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?
Dotfile madness
21–30 of 534 posts
Re: Dotfile madness
#22This is not a problem. This is the design.
It makes things completely controllable and you know where to look for configuration files.
Re: Dotfile madness
#23This is a symptom of a bigger problem, which is that programmer respect for resources that belong to the user is at an all-time low.
* CPU: We'll just have this web page peg the user's CPU running gobs of code because our designer wants to unnecessarily animate this thinggy or our ad network wants to mine bitcoins. (Related resource: Mobile phone battery)
* Memory: We'll just use this web framework and embedded browser that uses up 1GB of the user's RAM, for a one-window chat application we're writing because we can't be bothered to learn anything but Javascript.
* Disk/Storage: We'll just cache 20GB of easily-regeneratable internal data so the app seems faster than it is, dumping it somewhere for the user to find and clean up.
* Network Bandwidth: Our shopping cart web page load is larger than the full installation of a 2000-era video game because we have to have 6 layers of framework abstraction and taking the time to optimize/minimize it wouldn't let us release fast and "crush it" in the market!
Nobody seems to care. "Oh, Xyz is cheap, programmer time is expensive!" is the rallying cry. So let's push the cost our shitty practices to the user and make her buy more hardware.
Re: Dotfile madness
#24Why do programmers do this? What thought process leads to someone thinking this is a good idea?
It is safe. Everybody does it, there is .gitconfig, .ssh etc so one more would not hurt. Until there is 500 dotfiles, some long forgotten.
Manage your system. Do not expect someone else to manage it for you.
Re: Dotfile madness
#25One 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”.
That is the exact problem that the standard I talk about was designed to solve (apart from the clutter in the home directory).
I'd rather have minimal files in $HOME than megabytes or gigabytes in a deep hierarchy under $XDG_CONFIG_HOME
In reality, I have both.
In practice, I commit go the vesion control only the dotfiles I care about. And I ignore the rest.
Re: Dotfile madness
#26I 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?
Not everyone has a large $HOME directory. It might be mounted on a 128mb thumbdrive for all you know.
Re: Dotfile madness
#27Slight tangent, but I wish there was a standardized way to tell running processes to re-read their dotfiles.
If I change my .zshrc, I have to re-source it in each running instance of zsh. Sure, I could automate this. But I'd also like the same done in vim. And in weechat. And in mpv. And in everything using GNU Readline... you get the picture.
This is probably at the top of my list "biggest complaints that won't be resolved for numerous reasons." It sure would be nice though.
Re: Dotfile madness
#28This is not a problem. This is the design. It makes things completely controllable and you know where to look for configuration files.
If it was completely controllable, I’d have the ability to control where they are and put them out of my way. Lazy programmers use home as a default.
Home directories have become the *nix version of the Windows Registry.
Re: Dotfile madness
#29I 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?
Not everyone has a large $HOME directory. It might be mounted on a 128mb thumbdrive for all you know.
Even better; it means that your preferences will be literally portable.
Re: Dotfile madness
#30To 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…
Why not _shame_ openssh? Or vim? Or emacs? I would advise not calling for shame on any of these projects because they have a pattern to support that has been in place longer than the XDG standard has been in place. You can change gnupg's home dir, but it would break a lot of currently functional setups if it just moved.