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As I see a new release, I wish OpenSSH would conform to the XDG base directory specification. I do not agree with the proposed rationale [1] On a side note, I

As I see a new release, I wish OpenSSH would conform to the XDG base directory specification. I do not agree with the proposed rationale [1] On a side note, I lost the list of applications that are not conforming to it. I know there are a couple, and would be glad if you were to share the ones you know about. [1]: http://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2050 http://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2050

upofadown 8y ago
The rationale is pretty strong though: >OpenSSH (and it's ancestor ssh-1.x) have a 17 year history of using ~/.ssh. This location is baked into innumerable users' brains, millions of happily working configurations and countless tools. XDG can be considered as a case of arbitrary change for weak justification. SSH is definitely a case where people need to know exactly where the configuration is. There is no point in including it in the not very fun "find the config files" game engendered by XDG.
- egil 8y ago
  And that was in 2012. I reckon everybody who cares knows that openssh config uses ~/.ssh, and those who do not care will not cry if they accidently delete it.
- MayeulC 8y ago
  I agree on security issues, and making the path depend on an environment variable/per-user config file would be opening a new can of worms. However, an issue I have is that while you can configure that path system-wide, there is no way to control it per-user, or with a finer-gained approach. You can probably use mount namespaces to shadow a ~/.ssh with another config, but that seems overkill. I admit I have no practical use cases for this right now (though I probably did in the past) besides "uncluttering $HOME". As for hunting the config files, those would reside in ~/.config/ssh by default. I personally find it more irritating when a program picks a random folder instead of conforming to the spec (and if I set the environment variable to somewhere else, I then know where it is). Go hunt trough ~/{.program,.program/conf,Program/conf,Documents/Program/conf,Documents/My\ Games/conf}, or countless variants I experienced. Thought it is admittedly a much smaller problem with better-established programs such as openssh.
pseudalopex 8y ago
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/XDG_user_directories https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/XDG_user_directories

upofadown 8y ago

The rationale is pretty strong though: >OpenSSH (and it's ancestor ssh-1.x) have a 17 year history of using ~/.ssh. This location is baked into innumerable users' brains, millions of happily working configurations and countless tools. XDG can be considered as a case of arbitrary change for weak justification. SSH is definitely a case where people need to know exactly where the configuration is. There is no point in including it in the not very fun "find the config files" game engendered by XDG.

egil 8y ago
And that was in 2012. I reckon everybody who cares knows that openssh config uses ~/.ssh, and those who do not care will not cry if they accidently delete it.
MayeulC 8y ago
I agree on security issues, and making the path depend on an environment variable/per-user config file would be opening a new can of worms. However, an issue I have is that while you can configure that path system-wide, there is no way to control it per-user, or with a finer-gained approach. You can probably use mount namespaces to shadow a ~/.ssh with another config, but that seems overkill. I admit I have no practical use cases for this right now (though I probably did in the past) besides "uncluttering $HOME". As for hunting the config files, those would reside in ~/.config/ssh by default. I personally find it more irritating when a program picks a random folder instead of conforming to the spec (and if I set the environment variable to somewhere else, I then know where it is). Go hunt trough ~/{.program,.program/conf,Program/conf,Documents/Program/conf,Documents/My\ Games/conf}, or countless variants I experienced. Thought it is admittedly a much smaller problem with better-established programs such as openssh.

pseudalopex 8y ago

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/XDG_user_directories https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/XDG_user_directories