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Dotfile madness

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Re: Dotfile madness

#41

Post by reaperducer »

gryfft wrote: post #38

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…

The 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?

Re: Dotfile madness

#42

Post by kondor6c »

fxfan wrote: post #36
kondor6c wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not _shame_ openssh? Or vim? Or emacs? I would advise not calling for shame on any of these projects because they have a pattern to support that has been in place longer than the XDG standard has been in place. You can change gnupg's home dir, but it would break a lot of currently functional setups if it just moved.

I guess I was being nice to old programs. Also, these are programs that a lot of external tools interact with. Nobody cares about where firefox stores its data- except the now almost dead flash plugin.

Yes, very good point I do think that the older programs/projects have to plan a migration which really can be challenging. I think there are some that might care for example selenium might have the mozilla directory as a default and some might hard code it. The orchestration of such a change is difficult because I don't think too many people read changelog or really keep up with upstream modifications.

Good thoughts

Re: Dotfile madness

#43

Post by avip »

node_modules and yarn.lock etc. in the location where the tool was run is a feature, not a bug. Ask any python user digging to find where pip decided to drop it this time.

Re: Dotfile madness

#44

Post by reaperducer »

geggam wrote: post #33
reaperducer wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was completely controllable, I’d have the ability to control where they are and put them out of my way. Lazy programmers use home as a default. Home directories have become the *nix version of the Windows Registry.

Very likely you do have the control. You simply haven't taken the time to learn how to configure things.

Or not likely at all, since the whole point of TFA is that many popular programs do not follow specifications and user configuration.

Re: Dotfile madness

#45

Post by ethelward »

darkpuma wrote: post #27

Slight tangent, but I wish there was a standardized way to tell running processes to re-read their dotfiles. If I change my .zshrc, I have to re-source it in each running instance of zsh. Sure, I could automate this. But I'd also like the same done in vim. And in weechat. And in mpv. And in everything using GNU Readline... you get the picture. This is probably at the top of my list "biggest complaints that won't be r…

Some programs (I can think of Termite and Kitty) use the USR1 signal to this end.

Re: Dotfile madness

#46

Post by rb808 »

I think it makes a lot of sense to have all apps run in a sandbox or container by default. Everything is segregated and easy to monitor and track what its doing.

Re: Dotfile madness

#48

Post by xfitm3 »

saagarjha wrote: post #4

One thing I’ve been thinking about is that it would be nice to tag files with the program that created them. Aside from the clutter in my home directory, I have a lot of files that I have to guess as to where they originated from based on metadata like modification timestamps or permissions, but it would be nice to see something like “~/.config was created by some-tool”.

MacOS stores this for files I download through a browser. "Get Info" has a "Where from" property:

http://osxdaily.com/2010/10/12/find-out-where-a-file-was-dow...

Re: Dotfile madness

#49

Post by seqizz »

xaduha wrote: post #10

> We are no longer in control of our home directories. I can axe my home folder and rebuild it with `nixos-rebuild switch`, it's pretty minimal.

Do you mean `home-manager switch` or is there a feature in nixos to touch home folders?

Re: Dotfile madness

#50

Post by bauerd »

withinboredom wrote: post #26
bauerd wrote: post #21

I don't get the problem. Why bother where dotfiles are written to? GUI file managers and userland tools hide them by default. What would I gain by having them written outside of $HOME?

Not everyone has a large $HOME directory. It might be mounted on a 128mb thumbdrive for all you know.

Esoteric setups aside, I'd be interested to hear about problems that people actually have encountered with this convention.
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