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Dotfile madness

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Re: Dotfile madness

#101

Post by amaccuish »

sneak wrote: post #80
nine_k wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding an interface to access the tag store won't be very hard. It would be harder to make it so that all the tag-oblivious programs, like mv or vi, to say nothing of rsync, would preserve the attributes when moving or modifying a file.

Sidecar files might work, and would also be filesystem-portable.

Please no. This article is literally "Dotfile madness", don't make it worse!

I have to deal already with these on file shares, specifically for Apple: .DS_Store, .Trashes and .AppleDouble, or for Windows: Thumbs.db, $RECYCLE.BIN (for some reason Windows sometimes ignores the fact I've disabled the recycle bin on a share and creates this instead) and desktop.ini. Please don't drop crap around directories where there exist a multitude of tidier alternatives.

Re: Dotfile madness

#102

Post by tyingq »

gumby wrote: post #65

The lack of useful names on the files is IMHO the most egregious issue. (OK using names that don’t start with ‘.’ is worse). I don’t ls -A my homedir as much, but what the hell are .517827.padl? Who created .android (I don’t use android and don’t develop for it) etc. These people are arrogant shitheads and I’d like to know who they are so I can avoid their software. I assume if they do crap like this their software d…

Doesn't address your concerns, but that ".android" directory is probably from Firefox.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1146157

Re: Dotfile madness

#103

Post by 20190202 »

Crazy idea: what if we were to just nest a personal directory within ~?

i.e., New standard directory `~/personal`, new environment variable, $PERSONAL.

If we could come up with a default `~` like character for globbing to `$PERSONAL` like `~` does to `$HOME`, say, `@` (obviously that isn't the char to go with and I'm not a BASH expert to be able to pick one not already occupied). All your personal dotfiles are in `~`, all your personal files are in `@`. Default `cd` without args to `$PERSONAL`. No worries about tons of files that are in `~` because you live in `@`.

Re: Dotfile madness

#104

Post by netsec_burn »

megous wrote: post #98
netsec_burn wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't it to be easy to implement? You could probably make a global LD_PRELOAD library that hooks into all open() CREAT calls and tags the inode's xattr with the program that created the file. You could use an attribute like, user.created_by.

Why such a hack? This is a solved problem already. Try Linux audit API. You can set it up for tracking various actions, and you'll get a log with all the information including a process name. https://linux-audit.com/configuring-and-auditing-linux-syste...

I believe the question was asking for a method of storing the metadata, I was just suggesting xattrs. This will work at the expense of running a daemon.

Re: Dotfile madness

#105

Post by Waterluvian »

.files are very useful. I like the consistent idiom for where your "global" settings go for virtualenv, npm, tslint, flake8, git, whatever.

But it would have been so nice just to move it into a ~/cfgs or fine... even a ~/.cfgs or whatever.

I'm guessing engineers went, "ewww, I'd have to walk down the tree to find the next most relevant config file to use and then go UP into a directory when I hit home."

Re: Dotfile madness

#106

Post by lgeorget »

nine_k wrote: post #60
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”.

A general tagging mechanism, reasonably supported across filesystems , would be great to have. Not only for media collections. It's not easy to implement nicely, though.

There's an entire research field dedicated to the information flow control which could solve just that (if it were actually used).

In my research team, we used a tainting tracing mechanism to understand the behavior of malware. Basically, we installed a malware on a clean phone and we then traced all information flow originating from the APK to processes, to files, to sockets, etc. It helped reverse-engineering the malware.

Re: Dotfile madness

#107

Post by georgeecollins »

sandov wrote: post #90
fxfan wrote: post #16

To name and shame some culprits (the one's who have shame, I won't name java because I won't expect them to care) 1) Mozilla 2) Gnome 3) Gimp 4) GPG 5) Thunderbird (Why is there a sep directory and not under .mozilla) 6) mplayer I guess one reason why this occurs is that it's easier for to be carelessly cross-platform this way. Except you'd expect better from mozilla, specially because they store Windows stuff very w…

Speaking of Windows, their situation is worse. I remember installing a couple of games and suddenly my "My Documents" folder had "EA", "EA Games", "Electronic arts", "Rockstar games" folders.

Games do that by design so that they can be cleanly uninstalled without removing saved games and preferences. Also you should be able to backup your documents folder and not your programs folder and be safe. A good uninstaller should ask if you want to save them and remove them if you don’t.

I am not saying it is the best way. But I don’t think it is malicious or lazy.

Re: Dotfile madness

#108

Post by bennofs »

megous wrote: post #98
netsec_burn wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't it to be easy to implement? You could probably make a global LD_PRELOAD library that hooks into all open() CREAT calls and tags the inode's xattr with the program that created the file. You could use an attribute like, user.created_by.

Why such a hack? This is a solved problem already. Try Linux audit API. You can set it up for tracking various actions, and you'll get a log with all the information including a process name. https://linux-audit.com/configuring-and-auditing-linux-syste...

Can audit be configured to only log file creation, not modification or access? Last time I didn't find a way to do that and I don't want to write a log file entry for every file access.

Re: Dotfile madness

#109

Post by sneak »

amaccuish wrote: post #101
sneak wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sidecar files might work, and would also be filesystem-portable.

Please no. This article is literally "Dotfile madness", don't make it worse! I have to deal already with these on file shares, specifically for Apple: .DS_Store, .Trashes and .AppleDouble, or for Windows: Thumbs.db, $RECYCLE.BIN (for some reason Windows sometimes ignores the fact I've disabled the recycle bin on a share and creates this instead) and desktop.ini. Please don't drop crap around directories where there e…

How do you have to “deal with” them? What are the portable tidier alternatives?

Re: Dotfile madness

#110

Post by gumby »

tyingq wrote: post #102
gumby wrote: post #65

The lack of useful names on the files is IMHO the most egregious issue. (OK using names that don’t start with ‘.’ is worse). I don’t ls -A my homedir as much, but what the hell are .517827.padl? Who created .android (I don’t use android and don’t develop for it) etc. These people are arrogant shitheads and I’d like to know who they are so I can avoid their software. I assume if they do crap like this their software d…

Doesn't address your concerns, but that ".android" directory is probably from Firefox. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1146157

...which is not even installed on my machine!
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