Nix + home-manager. Boom.
Dotfile madness (2019)
21–30 of 185 posts
Re: Dotfile madness (2019)
#22While i agree dotfiles aren't the best, i'm concerned about creating too many alternatives. Then we risk ending up in this situation: https://xkcd.com/927/ As someone who uses linux to get other tasks done, rather than as a hobby in itself, I would rather have an aesthetically sub-optimal standard than have no idea what's going on.
This isn't some kind of new stuff. I'm not quite sure how old the XDG BDS spec is, but it's been at least 15 years; and the broad notion of using ~/.config rather than dumping stuff directly into ~ is older still.
Re: Dotfile madness (2019)
#23Re: Dotfile madness (2019)
#24I completely agree! That's why I created this site: https://xdgbasedirectoryspecification.com . We need some place where people can immediately understand the practical benefit, and the minimum ask of their users. Of course, it doesn't help just to complain about the issue in a void, so I've also submitted like 10 PRs and filed quite a few issues. Projects like pnpm and Poetry took note, and now they comply! Someone'…
The idea for your site is great. A quick suggestion: if you want everyone to immediately understand and sympathize with your cause, then use the tools that everyone knows in your examples. Using some long exa incantation risks alienating people that don't care about things like the latest trendy grep alternative. Just use: `ls -d .*` or `ls -a`
Re: Dotfile madness (2019)
#25I think the ship's long sailed. Too much software just throws random crap into $HOME, so it's best to give up. I've resigned myself to the state of affairs and my "real" $HOME is in $HOME/code $HOME/home. As the saying goes, layers are only added, never removed. The world where people respect XDG is not one that can be achieved anymore.
Which software in particular? Given my experience, it is well within reach, besides a few exceptions including Firefox/Thunderbird, etc, and one relating to Chromium-based browsers. The trick is to use the XDG Base Dir Spec, only if the old ~/.name location doesn't exist. Old users are happy because it doesn't break compatibility and new users are happy because nobody's dropping 10 sacks of potatoes on their metaphor…
Just a random sample from my home directory right now on a random dev server: .ssh, .gnupg, .vscode-server, .zshrc, .ipython, snap, .antigen, .pki, .profile, .python_history, and there's much more.
I don't know what's the situation with desktop linux, may it's better, maybe it's worse, but even on a headless dev server it's already a lost cause. Trying to convince everybody to move to a new standard is a hopeless task, imo, best to move on.
Re: Dotfile madness (2019)
#26I completely agree! That's why I created this site: https://xdgbasedirectoryspecification.com . We need some place where people can immediately understand the practical benefit, and the minimum ask of their users. Of course, it doesn't help just to complain about the issue in a void, so I've also submitted like 10 PRs and filed quite a few issues. Projects like pnpm and Poetry took note, and now they comply! Someone'…
Why does the "fixed" example still list .profile? Why wouldn't the shell config live with everything else?
Re: Dotfile madness (2019)
#27Eh, I dunno. XDG is just some group or whatever, dropping config files in .programname is the de-facto community standard. If people want to follow XDG that's fine, but I can't blame anybody who wants to ignore all that noise.
XDG is like four env vars. Doesn’t seem like much noise.
Re: Dotfile madness (2019)
#28Eh, I dunno. XDG is just some group or whatever, dropping config files in .programname is the de-facto community standard. If people want to follow XDG that's fine, but I can't blame anybody who wants to ignore all that noise.
> dropping config files in .programname is the de-facto community standard.
Fuck you so much.
Re: Dotfile madness (2019)
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which software in particular? Given my experience, it is well within reach, besides a few exceptions including Firefox/Thunderbird, etc, and one relating to Chromium-based browsers. The trick is to use the XDG Base Dir Spec, only if the old ~/.name location doesn't exist. Old users are happy because it doesn't break compatibility and new users are happy because nobody's dropping 10 sacks of potatoes on their metaphor…
Just a random sample from my home directory right now on a random dev server: .ssh, .gnupg, .vscode-server, .zshrc, .ipython, snap, .antigen, .pki, .profile, .python_history, and there's much more. I don't know what's the situation with desktop linux, may it's better, maybe it's worse, but even on a headless dev server it's already a lost cause. Trying to convince everybody to move to a new standard is a hopeless tas…
Oh right I forgot about those - I set some environment variables so I don't see any of those except for .pki
And in my opinion .ssh and .gnupg are okay since in some contexts, the "XDG variables" haven't been initialized in certain circumstances when using those utilities.
But yeah, I'll have to look into those - maybe there is something I can do to fix that
Re: Dotfile madness (2019)
#30I completely agree! That's why I created this site: https://xdgbasedirectoryspecification.com . We need some place where people can immediately understand the practical benefit, and the minimum ask of their users. Of course, it doesn't help just to complain about the issue in a void, so I've also submitted like 10 PRs and filed quite a few issues. Projects like pnpm and Poetry took note, and now they comply! Someone'…
The idea for your site is great. A quick suggestion: if you want everyone to immediately understand and sympathize with your cause, then use the tools that everyone knows in your examples. Using some long exa incantation risks alienating people that don't care about things like the latest trendy grep alternative. Just use: `ls -d .*` or `ls -a`
Thanks for the suggestion - agreed, I'll make that change