This is pretty cool! It's surprising to see the project be at version 0.2.5 when the first commit was _yesterday_ though. What's the reason behind cutting this many releases?
I cut releases as I find bugs and commit fixes.
Show HN: boxxy – Control where Linux programs put files, without symlinks
201–210 of 250 posts
Re: Show HN: boxxy – Control where Linux programs put files, without symlinks
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
The XDG base directory specification[0] was initially introduced in 2003; 20 years ago now. Yes there's plenty of software that existed before 2003 which didn't respect XDG, but most all of the Linux software dumping dotfiles in my homedir where written not just after 2003, but many years after 2003. For example, the following pieces of software all have dumped garbage in my homedir, and all are much less than 20 yea…
> There's no excuses for these programs not respecting standards that are 1. Well established by the time the software was written and 2. short This isn't a standard, it's a convention at best. A freedesktop.org specification. Basically a scheme Red Hat people thought up and implemented widely in the open source software projects they control. It may be a useful abstraction but there's absolutely no obligation to con…
> This isn't a standard, it's a convention at best.
So is, like, basically all of userland in a UNIX system. Maybe we need to start looking at that as a problem instead of an excuse.
It is within your power as a developer to delete the user's home directory if you want to as well, that doesn't mean you should do it!
Re: Show HN: boxxy – Control where Linux programs put files, without symlinks
#203I wonder if this could be used to move the obnoxious ~/snap directory.
While reading more about this I found out about the ~/.hidden file which I'm pretty excited about. The following hides the folder from Thunar & Dolphin (and presumably other file managers): echo snap >> ~/.hidden
But sadly `ls ~` will still show it.
Re: Show HN: boxxy – Control where Linux programs put files, without symlinks
#204Chromium doesn't respect XDG config, it always creates ~/Downloads directory on startup. It was so annoying, I hope this tool helps me fix it.
Maybe change download location in chrome://settings/downloads to where you want?
Re: Show HN: boxxy – Control where Linux programs put files, without symlinks
#205Hah 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, o…
That's usually not a problem though.
The software can look at $XDG_WHATEVER/tool/config first and ~/.toolrc second. Everyone who wants the clutter can keep using that.
Re: Show HN: boxxy – Control where Linux programs put files, without symlinks
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Windows does (did at least) And macOS has Xxx.localized directories
Windows just localizes how it shown on Explorer (and have API to get localized name), so real path is still C:\Users\user\Documents . macOS does the same thing by the way as you wrote. I don't think it's a problem. Only XDG based systems use real /home/user/ドキュメント (in Japanese) directory . This is annoying. Please localize it well as Win/mac does.
Now yes, but it didn't used to be that way. No, I can't tell you which version changed that, it might have been 2000. :P
Re: Show HN: boxxy – Control where Linux programs put files, without symlinks
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s really frustrating are the number of first-party Microsoft products which do this.
Yeah. It annoys me to no end that the new powershell didn't take the opportunity to move the config out of My Documents and into roaming app data which in theory is where that sort of file should be. It's things like that which have made me give up on %USERPROFILE% (and to a lesser extent $HOME), and I now put my files that I care about into a completely separate folder outside of the normal hierarchy.
Could you elaborate on that? I too am quite unhappy with the mess my %USERPROFILE% has become.
Re: Show HN: boxxy – Control where Linux programs put files, without symlinks
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's why that kind of software uses a .programX directory, where everything like that can be put in. Look at ~/.wine for example... config files, whole C drive, everything in one simple folder. Want to upgrade to an alpha version to test something, but don't want to break anything that's now working? Just backup that one single folder. Restore or migrate configuration to another computer? One single folder. Remove…
> Look at ~/.wine for example... config files, whole C drive, everything in one simple folder Except it isn't really. Just a few days ago I tried to purge Wine from my system. Uninstalled through pacman, cleaned up orphaned dependencies. Killed the ./wine folder and various other leftovers too, because depite your claim, there they were, though I didn't commit to memory exactly where and what. Removed some autostart…
IMO, Wine desktop integration should be off by default.
Like with privacy issues, once you realize you want to opt out the mess has already been made.
Re: Show HN: boxxy – Control where Linux programs put files, without symlinks
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Look at ~/.wine for example... config files, whole C drive, everything in one simple folder Except it isn't really. Just a few days ago I tried to purge Wine from my system. Uninstalled through pacman, cleaned up orphaned dependencies. Killed the ./wine folder and various other leftovers too, because depite your claim, there they were, though I didn't commit to memory exactly where and what. Removed some autostart…
Just FYI, in case it is useful for you: Here's the information that you would want for cleaning that up. https://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#How_do_I_clean_the_Open_With_Lis... If you ever want to prevent this integration from happening in the first place, you can do it by editing the registry in a given wine prefix. You can run regedit with the usual command, `wine regedit`, then locate the key: HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Wind…
> It is unfortunate that it has to be outside of the WINEPREFIX, but there's no way around it
There is a way around unwanted and unexpected associations though: make the integration opt-in instead of opt-out and/or filter associations that the user is unlikely to ever want (like standard file types that will almost certainly already be handled outside Wine). Wine's Internet Explorer is there for compatibilty with Windows programs that expect IE, exposing it outside the Wine environment does not make any sense.
Since I use multiple prefixes, including temporary ones, editing registry in each one of them is not an option so I have my package manager set not to install winemenubuilder at all.
Re: Show HN: boxxy – Control where Linux programs put files, without symlinks
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see the problem. There's no reason to choose one or the other when we can have both. Many programs try several options. Git for example tries ~/.gitconfig and ~/.config/git/config. Do people seriously resist such non-destructive improvements just because they think it's offensive when younger programmers have opinions on legacy software?
Personally I see a lot of young people use emacs and BSD licences, but because I'm an older engineer and have the wisdom and experience of time, I use vim and GPL.
What age are those who use nano?
/hides