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Modetc: Move your dotfiles from kernel space
- yokoprime 9mo agoI struggle to see a valid usecase for this that isn’t handled by symlinks.
- regularfry 9mo agoIf I symlink ~/.ssh -> ~/.config/ssh, I still have .ssh in my ~. Whereas if I rewrite it, I don't.
- hvenev 9mo agoWill you not have `~/.ssh`? If you have `.ssh .config/ssh` as a rewrite rule, `stat ~/.ssh` will still find it.
- txtsd 9mo agoThe point is to have a clean home directory.
- jl6 9mo agoAbandon hope. I just treat ~ as a system-owned configuration area, and put my actual files (documents, photos, etc.) in a completely different hierarchy under /.
- oftenwrong 9mo agoI have been doing this for decades. My files are in a sub-directory of $HOME. It also makes it very obvious when a piece of software does not treat your $HOME with respect.
- SAI_Peregrinus 9mo ago"/home/${USER}" for whatever junk programs are going to stick there, "/home/${USER}/home" for my "real" home directory.
- trollbridge 9mo agoYou could write a kernel module, then, that just hides certain symlinks from you (which is effectively what this module is).
- ComputerGuru 9mo agoOn Windows this was always easier because, for some reason, most everyone respected %appdata% compared to XDG_CONFIG_HOME, but also because hidden files wasn’t just a naming convention but an actual separate metadata flag.
- Sardtok 9mo agoAlways... Except for the decades before this became common. Never a bloated C: root directory. Microsoft even had games store stuff in My Documents\Games at one point. My Documents was a user dir that saw a lot of abuse over the years.
- SAI_Peregrinus 9mo agoThey still have that, it's just `My Documents\My Games` now. And Visual Studio makes a folder in My Documents for every annual release. And…
- ComputerGuru 9mo agoYes, as in there’s no reason Linux can’t clean up its game the same way.
- Joker_vD 9mo agoThat ship has sailed 30 years ago.
- user3939382 9mo agoThe use case is that you can actually use your home directory without either (a) hiding files or (b) wading through 40 config files and dirs that XDG ignorant devs put there.
- rnhmjoj 9mo agoHi, author here: whether it's a valid use case depends on your level of OCD, but the difference compared to symlinks or bind mounts is that you will have a clean home: e.g. `ls -la` won't show any "hidden" files. Also, completely unrelated to my motivation, someone pointed out that modetc could be used to quickly hotfix packages built with Nix. Say that you need to fix a CVE in openssl, normally that would require to rebuild all dependent packages, which takes a long time. Instead with something like modetc you could build just openssl and rewrite /nix/store/<hash>-openssl-3.6.0/ -> /nix/store/<hash>-openssl-3.6.0-hotfix/. Another application might be replacing some configuration file with placeholders for secrets, with one file with the secrets substituted in, without having to modify it in place, possibly only for a specific UID. This is something you might find useful on NixOS.
- tengwar2 9mo agoOne of the annoyances of Linux is working out where configuration information is, following through multiple layers of indirection and files over-riding other files. This looks like adding another layer, another place to look, and if you're reading the man file for a shell (for example) it probably won't even mention that this could invalidate the information contained in that in the man file.
- deafpolygon 9mo agoAlways check the man pages..
- tengwar2 9mo agoAnd I said that the man pages would be a part of what you have to examine. 95 pages in the case of bash (that's after running it through troff). man pages were fine when they were three pages long, but their lack of any internal index has become a problem. Ok, now you might have a dozen files which could contain the information, where the location of each file can be modified by environment variables. It's tolerable if you are working on something you change weekly, but a practical problem if you do it yearly or it's entirely new.
- BenjiWiebe 9mo ago'man bash'. Type G. Press PgUp until you see the FILES heading (took one press for my terminal size). There's your list of files. Alternatively, instead of G and PgUp, type /FILES<Enter>. Of course, this doesn't help at all when software either doesn't have manpages, or doesn't include the list of files in the manpage. Just nitpicking your bash example.
- tengwar2 9mo agoThis is HN, not Reddit. You can safely assume that every single person here knows how to use man, particularly if they mention using troff to format it properly. There remains a problem.
- user3939382 9mo agoI absolutely love this and have wanted to take the time to build this for years precisely because of dotfiles. Thank you!
- pimlottc 9mo agoI didn’t understand what this was from the title. Perhaps a better description would be “mod_rewrite for your homedir”
- roryirvine 9mo agoThat sparked a memory of rewritefs, which I used when rationalising a few hundred thousand legacy mod_rewrite rules at a web hosting company in the early 2010s: https://github.com/sloonz/rewritefs https://github.com/sloonz/rewritefs Looks like it was based on a mid-2000s system called libetc, which did a similar job but had to be LD_PRELOADed: https://ordiluc.net/fs/libetc/ https://ordiluc.net/fs/libetc/
- amusingimpala75 9mo agoFrom the example: # XDG "compliant" programs .config/ etc/ .local/state/ var/lib/ .cache/ var/cache/ This is the first I’ve heard of using ~/etc instead of ~/.config as $XDG_CONFIG_DIR. Is there any precedent for that?
- rnhmjoj 9mo agoWell, it's just the natural extension of the FHS convention to the home directory. I didn't come up with this idea, though, I think I saw this in a reddit thread and started doing it myself: I like that the directories are visible and follow the usual structure.
- godelski 9mo agoWhy not push it under a hidden directory? Like ~/.local/etc? If we're reconstructing some of the hierarchy I think it makes sense to group and hide. Isn't the problem that the home folder is getting cluttered?
- rnhmjoj 9mo agoWhy would I hide them? They're not really special and since I'm organising them with modetc they're not cluttered. For reference, my home looks something like this ~ ├── bin binaries and scripts ├── etc configuration files ├── var │ ├── lib program data │ └── cache program caches ├── src git repositories ├── img pictures ├── mail email in maildir format ├── note text notes, todo ├── doc documents └── down downloads
- godelski 9mo agoI mean we hide in the first place because configs and we don't want to clutter But more I was thinking that having ~/bin ~/etc ~/src and so on is just clutter. I use ~/.local/{bin,build,lib} so it's compact and reduces clutter in my home
- 9mo ago
- simonkagedal 9mo agoThe limit of 16 rules is interesting. Where does that come from?
- Joker_vD 9mo agoEvery time I see yet another dotfile-management solution I just can't help but wonder: maybe it's the dotfiles that are the problem?
- ycombinatrix 9mo agoNixOS solves the same problem without having to mess with the kernel
- erlkonig 9mo agoXDG doesn't handle complex environments, especially not heterogeneous computing environments. Something long the core strength of Unix is acknowledged by XDG and then left utterly unaddressed. Without this, the "standard" is as much an impediment as an aid. It's amusing that modetc goes through all this effort to twist dotfiles into the XDG half-solution, and here I am using symlinks through /dev/shm/xdg/* to warp XDG into sort-of working in an actual heterogeneous environment. Because XDG by itself is a failure beyond trivial cases.