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Dotfile madness

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Re: Dotfile madness

#121

Post by [deleted] »

amaccuish wrote: post #112
georgeecollins wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is literally a folder in every Windows profile (Vista onwards) called "Saved Games", it should all go there.

[deleted]

Re: Dotfile madness

#122

Post by otterley »

tempay wrote: post #73
bauerd wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

My partner has to manage having a 500MB quota on their home directory at work. A couple of times a month something decides to dump 300+ MB of data in there and break everything.

A 300MB file isn't a preferences file, though.

Re: Dotfile madness

#123

Post by otterley »

withinboredom wrote: post #52
otterley wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even better; it means that your preferences will be literally portable.

Yep, until your program crashes because you weren't expecting a 10b file to run out of disk space.

Preferences files tend to be pretty small; I'd be rather surprised even if a 128MB thumb drive couldn't store them all. The bulk of the space will almost certainly be consumed by other things.

Re: Dotfile madness

#124

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

franky47 wrote: post #34
Jaruzel wrote: post #2

This isn't just a Linux problem. In Windows, the users /documents folder is polluted in exactly the same way these days.

Also on macOS, where [~]/Library/ApplicationSupport is the designed and recommended place to store config files, logs, preferences and all kinds of persistent data, the home directory still gets cluttered. It's a laziness issue, it won't be solved solely by making is easier to access the right locations on each system/platform, but that would be a step in the right direction.

At this point the right solution is to just not allow applications to choose. Give each their own view of the file hierarchy but keep all the crap they spew out in a location obviously related to them from the user's view of the file hierarchy.

Re: Dotfile madness

#125

Post by sascha_sl »

nycticorax wrote: post #119

To me, the real problem is not the dotfiles, but the regular (i.e. non-hidden) files that applications surreptitiously create in my home folder. (Which the author does mention as being particularly bad.) dotfiles in the home folder are not a new thing on Linux (e.g. .bashrc, .profile, .emacs, etc.), even if it would be better if more applications used the XDG folders. And if I don't see them when I "ls", they don't b…

>And when people complain, the devs have the gall to suggest that this is all fine.

You're complaining on a really high level and nobody suggested "this is fine". They suggested "wishlist" is fine according to their definition of "if it's not immediately broken and a fix is not trivial"

If you have an issue with default folders that are quite normal in a modern desktop environment I suggest you move back to Arch or wherever you came from and install i3 again?

Re: Dotfile madness

#126

Post by dijit »

nycticorax wrote: post #119

To me, the real problem is not the dotfiles, but the regular (i.e. non-hidden) files that applications surreptitiously create in my home folder. (Which the author does mention as being particularly bad.) dotfiles in the home folder are not a new thing on Linux (e.g. .bashrc, .profile, .emacs, etc.), even if it would be better if more applications used the XDG folders. And if I don't see them when I "ls", they don't b…

Same for the default gopath. That was horrifying the first time. At least you can override it.

Re: Dotfile madness

#127

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

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?

Some of us like to pretend that we own our personal computer, not whatever developer deigns to allow their software to run on it.

Re: Dotfile madness

#128

Post by kardos »

It seems to me that distros are in the right position to nudge this in the right direction. For example, Fedora did the /usr merge, moved to systemd, wayland, etc. The great dotfile cleanup would probably work by patching all packaged software to do config files the right way, plus sending the patches upstream. Then in a few release cycles this would be more or less solved.
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