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From a user standpoint, a lot of of unrecognizable things show up if you pass that -l flag. In my opinion, having a conventional place to look for user configu
by gryfft 8y ago
From a user standpoint, a lot of of unrecognizable things show up if you pass that -l flag.
In my opinion, having a conventional place to look for user configuration in plain text is a good thing, not a bad thing, and of course I would want it to be in the directory on my system where I'm the sole owner. As somebody else mentioned, this means backing up my personal settings and files is braindead simple, too.
Asking programmers to respect $XDG_HOME_CONFIG is not a bad idea, but it's no replacement for home directory hygiene. I believe that ultimately, cleanliness is a personal responsibility.
Edit: reduced smugness quotient while trying to preserve my argument. I apologize for the pre-edit tone issues with this post.
- reaperducer 8y agoThe other way-- and I'm sorry for how smug this sounds-- is to just not litter in your own home directory without cleaning it up. How about the other way is I’ll just stop using your product/service/business that doesn’t respect my machine?
- gryfft 8y agoThat's my point exactly. Most of these programs have command line flags you can pass to indicate the configuration file that should be used. Doing that, and then by default putting my configuration in the most reasonable place for it--a dotfile-- is, in my opinion, the most respectful way a programmer can treat someone's machine. Not to mention that most of these are free and open source, so building according to convention is the best way to keep their userbase happy (as fiddlerwoaroof pointed out, $HOME was the original conventional dotfile location pre-2003.) So if your program doesn't respect my machine (meaning allow me to configure it to prevent unwanted behavior) then yes absolutely, into the bin with it. And rm -rf its dotfiles after.
- afiori 8y agoyou could check if ~/.local/share and ~/.config exist. also there is a difference between files that the user is supposed to interact with and inner configuration of random apps. ~/.ssh is fine, I need to look at it for many .emacs.d is fine as is something you are expected to edit manually, but I don't even know what some of these are: .aspell.en.prepl .dmrc .dropbox .dropbox-dist .gtkrc-2.0 .joe_state .oracle_jre_usage .pdfsam .pylint.d snap .texlive2016 .wget-hsts .vscode .xdvirc This is from a fresh install 3 months ago, do I need 2 dot-folders for dropbox?
- anoncake 8y ago> Having a conventional place to look for user configuration in plain text That place is $XDG_HOME_CONFIG (~/.config)
- fiddlerwoaroof 8y agoThe original convention was dotfiles in $HOME. The $XDG_HOME_CONFIG convention is comparatively new as it was introduced in 2003.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoYou can't expect such things to be updated in 16 years?
- fiddlerwoaroof 8y agoI’ve been using Linux long enough that things moving to the freedesktop specification disrupts my expectations. Plus, it’s not obvious that having to traverse the extra directory is worth it: it’s nice to be able to do vim ~/.prog<tab> and save a couple keystrokes when editing commonly edited config files.
- fiddlerwoaroof 8y agoPlus, the backwards compatibility issues of changing standardized pathnames has a pretty high cost in terms of updating existing shell scripts and such.
- anoncake 8y agoexport XDG_HOME_CONFIG=$HOME
- fiddlerwoaroof 8y agoThis isn’t a solution, because programs that follow the standard generally don’t create dotfiles. export XDG_HOME_CONFIG=$HOME/. might work for some broken programs but it would be a hack.