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Show HN: boxxy – Control where Linux programs put files, without symlinks

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Re: Show HN: boxxy – Control where Linux programs put files, without symlinks

#81

Post by joshuaissac »

adhoc_slime wrote: post #6

Hah I was literally just complaining about applications not following the XDG directory spec today. there's a non-exhaustive list of applications on the archwiki [0] that put their config/data in dotfiles in the home directory. surprisingly, there's also lots of pushback from maintainers of projects who don't want to change this, for whatever excuse they can produce. a Reddit thread has some list of issues where the…

Some of these programs also spam the home folder on Windows instead of using the path specified in the %APPDATA% environment variable.

Re: Show HN: boxxy – Control where Linux programs put files, without symlinks

#83

Post by Gare »

warent wrote: post #11
sosodev wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be surprised how many of us were obsessed with Boxxy lol.

YUP, she was the OG camgirl, sadly got all the worst parts of the gross attention / fame without any of the perks/money that Belle Delphine gets now

At least it seems she's doing okay. Money, fame and attention can ruin lives, especially if obtained at a young age.

Re: Show HN: boxxy – Control where Linux programs put files, without symlinks

#84

Post by ajsnigrutin »

adhoc_slime wrote: post #6

Hah I was literally just complaining about applications not following the XDG directory spec today. there's a non-exhaustive list of applications on the archwiki [0] that put their config/data in dotfiles in the home directory. surprisingly, there's also lots of pushback from maintainers of projects who don't want to change this, for whatever excuse they can produce. a Reddit thread has some list of issues where the…

The dotfiles and dotfolders directly in the home folder is "the way it was always done", and now some "new kids" came and want changes done to software which has existed before they were even born. People have muscle memory for those folders, some have hardcoded those paths in other scripts, others just don't care, and things stay as they always were.

On one hand, it's great to have all the stuff in the same place, on the other hand, we used to have this, before the ~/.config folder too.

Also, it's not just in one place anymore, but in many places -- so to completely remove a programX, it's not enough to just remove ~/.programX, but you need to remove a folder from ~/.config/, and another one from ~/.local/something, and another form ~/.cache,...

So yeah, i understand 'the old guys' too... maybe because i'm not 20-something anymore.

Re: Show HN: boxxy – Control where Linux programs put files, without symlinks

#85

Post by acdw »

notamy wrote: post #78
ossusermivami wrote: post #72

nice idea but tmux may not be the right example for the readme example since tmux actually supports XDG and its config in ~/.config/tmux/tmux.conf

TIL! I guess I'll find a better example.

I humbly submit either bash, sh, or zsh --- they all put dotfiles in $HOME that you can't move (zsh technically /can/, but they're still dotfiles and you have to set them in ~/.zshenv). Very annoying IMO.

Course, might not work so well with the way boxxy is run ... unless you chsh to boxxy bash or something.

Re: Show HN: boxxy – Control where Linux programs put files, without symlinks

#86

Post by notamy »

stabbles wrote: post #77
notamy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It creates a new mount namespace, and bind-mounts your ENTIRE filesystem into it, before chrooting, so that it can optionally remount / as ro to prevent applications from writing outside of the desired directories. The namespace is to allow doing the bind mounts in the first place.

Is there an infinite recursion in /tmp? Do you use a bubblewrap-like pivot_root trick?

> Is there an infinite recursion in /tmp?

No! The directory in /tmp outside of the "box" is completely empty; the remount of / is only seen within the mount namespace.

Re: Show HN: boxxy – Control where Linux programs put files, without symlinks

#87

Post by notamy »

jpeeler wrote: post #74
notamy wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sadly can't. Regex paths are hard due to the way it's implemented; if it was intercepting syscalls via ptrace then regex would be a lot more viable, but since this is just a glorified collection of bind mounts in the end, I'm unsure how I'd implement that nicely...

Okay understood. Consider adding a way to query all files written by a boxed application. If it generated a config file based on this info that would be super useful. Thanks for considering!

Absolutely a good idea! I'll have to see what's doable.

Re: Show HN: boxxy – Control where Linux programs put files, without symlinks

#88

Post by remram »

joshuaissac wrote: post #81
adhoc_slime wrote: post #6

Hah I was literally just complaining about applications not following the XDG directory spec today. there's a non-exhaustive list of applications on the archwiki [0] that put their config/data in dotfiles in the home directory. surprisingly, there's also lots of pushback from maintainers of projects who don't want to change this, for whatever excuse they can produce. a Reddit thread has some list of issues where the…

Some of these programs also spam the home folder on Windows instead of using the path specified in the %APPDATA% environment variable.

Some also put it in %HOMEPATH%/.name because they are bad ports from Unix. I'd argue that it's better than in My Documents though.
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