On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 01:52:11PM -0600, Aaron Toponce wrote: > On 4/28/2010 11:02 AM, Andrew McNabb wrote: > > Wow. Libetc looks really, really evil. I think I'd rather stick with > > my 142 dotfiles than use a library that intercepts file operations. > > There's just no way that this could ever work without drastic side > > effects, and the value to me would be minimal. Running `ls -a` is a bit > > ugly, but it never hurt anyone. > > And when desktop standards are actually adhered to with ~/.config/, "ls > -a" is almost pleasant.
As far as I can tell, the relevant standard is the XDG Base Directory Specification. In my personal experience, it seems to be used entirely by GUI applications that are hostile to command-line users. For example, Chromium writes pages of gibberish to its Preferences file, making it impossible to manage the configuration by hand. Chromium doesn't even seem to respect this fancy new standard; the .config/chromium directory has 120MB of junk, but it doesn't put any data in the $XDG_DATA_HOME directory (.local/share). This new standard doesn't make your home directory any less cluttered, it just spreads out the clutter. My primary objection to this standard is that it advocates breaking decades of backwards compatibility without proposing any benefit that I can see. Now you have my opinion. :) If we really wanted to reduce clutter in home directories, we would stop applications from writing out junk to the disk in the first place. If I start an application once and then immediately quit, there shouldn't be anything new in my home directory. If I run ls -a, I see dozens of directories created by applications that I used for less than 5 minutes. Even Mindguard wrote out a configuration file! What is the world coming to? :) -- Andrew McNabb http://www.mcnabbs.org/andrew/ PGP Fingerprint: 8A17 B57C 6879 1863 DE55 8012 AB4D 6098 8826 6868 -------------------- BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ The opinions expressed in this message are the responsibility of their author. They are not endorsed by BYU, the BYU CS Department or BYU-UUG. ___________________________________________________________________ List Info (unsubscribe here): http://uug.byu.edu/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
