RetroPie installs RetroArch overlays in the wrong directory(?)

[carlosefr]

The location where RetroArch overlays are supposed to reside is quite confusing. There are multiple possible locations and symlinks, and the effective location seems to point at the wrong place (RetroArch sees only an empty keyboards directory).

Here's what I dug up...

My /opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch.cfg contains overlay_directory = "~/.config/retroarch/overlays" (a setting which I did not change myself). But that directory contains nothing besides an empty keyboards directory.

But ~/.config/retroarch is a symlink to /opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch, and in that directory there's an overlay directory with the contents of the libretro/common-overlays repo. This doesn't show in RetroArch due to the above retroarch.cfg configuration.

This comes from the update_overlays_retroarch() function in scriptmodules/emulators/retroarch.sh [code], which uses the singular overlay.

There's also what looks like a compatibility symlink being created later on in the configure_retroarch function [code] pointing at singular overlay, but I don't see any reference to that symlinked path (/opt/retropie/emulators/retroarch/overlays) anywhere.

It seems that this should be cleaned up somehow, but I'm not even sure what upstream RetroArch uses as default, if it's overlays or overlay.

I'm using RetroArch 1.19.1 on Ubuntu 22.04 x86_64 and git blame tell's me that the code sections I referenced above were changed 9 years ago, which is way before I installed RetroPie on this machine.