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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

#131

Post by dopidopHN »

brigandish wrote: post #121
cube2222 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, sticking everything into `$HOME/.toolname` is what most cross-platform software is doing, and I imagine that's just fine for the vast majority of users.

Short, memorable passwords like one's birthday or favourite pet's name are "just fine for the vast majority of users". It's a meaningless metric of quality - or more to the point - it isn't a metric of quality.

Weak passwords have securities downside.

I struggle to see what the issue is with ~/.programName ?

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

#132

Post by fsckboy »

RamblingCTO wrote: post #21
vippy wrote: post #3

Ok, hi! My name is Boxxy...

God, that title sent me down memory lane https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bMLrA_0O5I

and then that day when the stars aligned and Boxxy met the Overly Attached Girlfriend https://www.rouming.cz/archived/boxxy_overly_attached_girlfr...

my favorite Boxxy autotune remix is this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q7cqT3BiOI

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

#134

Post by accoil »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #106
Already__Taken wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a bunch of windows stuff does this too putting config in appdata/local and huge cache assets in appdata/roaming. anything that depends on good behaviour is doomed imo like Google wave circles

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.

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

#135

Post by superluserdo »

Plug: I made a small set of shell scripts to achieve something similar to this a couple of years ago, but with symlinks:

https://tomwh.uk/blog/posts/2020/03/28/fake-home-prison/

https://tomwh.uk/git/fake-home.git/

It's a simple command that shadows the binary names you want with a wrapper in ~/.local/bin/ that calls the original binary after redefining $HOME to be somewhere else (by default inside ~/.local/share/fake-home/).

So if you have a program foo that dumps stuff in ~/.foo, then running `fakehome-banish foo` will create a symlink "foo" inside ~/.local/bin/evil-software (which is added to $PATH) that points to "fakehome".

"fakehome" is a simple wrapper script that, busybox-style, gets the binary name that it's being called as ("foo"), and then sets $HOME to be ~/.local/share/fakehome and calls the original foo binary.

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

#136

Post by superluserdo »

chungy wrote: post #113
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

eg. ~./bashrc has existed there for 30+ years, changing stuff just because someone doesn't like seeing a file in a folder is imho stupid.

A hidden file, even. Stop using "ls -A" and you'll be fine.

To be pedantic, if we're going to cite Unix history, then technically there is no such thing as a "hidden" file. As I understand, the original implementation of tools like ls would not show the current directory "." in the listing. The quickest way of doing this in C was checking whether dentry.name[0] == '.'

This also had the side effect of hiding entries that had names beginning with ".", and over time an implementation bug/quirk became accepted behaviour, and was post-hoc rationalised as "hidden" files.

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

#137

Post by matheusmoreira »

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…

> surprisingly, there's also lots of pushback from maintainers of projects who don't want to change this, for whatever excuse they can produce.

There doesn't need to be an "excuse" though. "I don't like it" or "I don't want to do it" is more than enough. They're the ones maintaining the damn things, the least we can do is respect them. They don't really need to justify anything, acting as if they had to is how you get pushback. They probably deny you just to prove that you have no power over them, because you insinuated otherwise with words like "excuse".

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

#138

Post by renewiltord »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #124
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#139

Post by fsckboy »

I hate when applications ignore the XDG spec, but you know what I hate more? the XDG spec!

I don't want all my pictures to go in Pictures, all my documents in Documents, etc. I want everything from each project to go in the directory for that project. I don't need it to read my mind, but when I save a document to a new directory and then I want to save a spreadsheet too... I want that new directory to be a top-line choice, but I want the old directory there too.

Doesn't everybody work like me? (asking seriously)

and hey, call me a freak, but I still get the odd sort of picture that I don't want showing up on the lock screen screensaver

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

#140

Post by its-summertime »

fsckboy wrote: post #139

I hate when applications ignore the XDG spec, but you know what I hate more? the XDG spec! I don't want all my pictures to go in Pictures, all my documents in Documents, etc. I want everything from each project to go in the directory for that project. I don't need it to read my mind, but when I save a document to a new directory and then I want to save a spreadsheet too... I want that new directory to be a top-line c…

hypothetical, but, could easily make a script that, upon cd, checks all above directories for `.xdg-root`, and while inside, has envvars set to use said folder as a root for Documents/Pictures/Etc folders
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