On 4/28/2010 2:31 PM, Andrew McNabb wrote: > 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.
Spreading out the clutter, however, means only seeing it when I specifically wish to do so. Which means I would have to enter ~/.config/openbox/ or ~/.local/share/gnome-do/ if I want to view those files. While the number of configs might be the same, the sheer amount to wade through is minimized substantially. > 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. :) Thus, the reason it's been slow to adopt. Everyone is afraid of breaking something. I believe the benefit of the XDG Base Directory Spec using $XDG_CONFIG_HOME or $HOME/.config/ is to minimize the sheer number of configs out of $HOME with "ls -a". Maybe I'm off my rocker, but spreading the files out, rather than massive data soup is an advantage. > 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? :) You've hit a nerve. This is really quite disconcerting. I understand cache files, such as using my web browser, but creating dot configs, just because I launched an application, is flat out dumbfounding. In fact, I don't really understand the purpose of dot configs for default installs. Mention its use in the manual, or /usr/share/doc/app/, but don't plop one down, just because you think I want to hack it. I may be perfectly happy with the defaults provided by the binary. -- . O . O . O . . O O . . . O . . . O . O O O . O . O O . . O O O O . O . . O O O O . O O O
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