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> My recollection is that most CP/M programs were configured via patching. I honestly would have liked that better for a lot of programs than the dotfiles they litter all over my home directory.
Well, they are supposed to be all in .config, problem is many app developers think they are special little boys that deserve its own directory
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, it was definitely a thing. The patching code had to be in Z80/8080 machine code. I wrote higher performance keyboard and display routines for my copy of Wordstar using this feature.
Stuff like that is also cool (reminds me a bit of modding some games), patching machine code to improve performance of a compiled app? Very cool! (My dad might have done that, he has an old ZX81) But I thought specifically patching something to configure it is such a weird concept that I never would have thought of.
One could say that the difference is whether the developers intended the changes you're making to be possible or not, but what about programs with dedicated modding APIs?
> My recollection is that most CP/M programs were configured via patching. I honestly would have liked that better for a lot of programs than the dotfiles they litter all over my home directory.
> My recollection is that most CP/M programs were configured via patching. I honestly would have liked that better for a lot of programs than the dotfiles they litter all over my home directory.
Well, they are supposed to be all in .config, problem is many app developers think they are special little boys that deserve its own directory
Interfacing with people is never easy.
> My recollection is that most CP/M programs were configured via patching. I honestly would have liked that better for a lot of programs than the dotfiles they litter all over my home directory.
If people just followed the XDG Base Directory Specification, config file littering would be a non-issue. More and more projects adopt it, even holdouts like Firefox.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yea this is something I'd love to see standardised, a distro that was able to enforce a .config folder somehow would be a winner for me. Think weve probably missed the boat though.
As these things go, there obviously is a standard for this called the XDG Base Directory Specification[0], which elegantly solves almost all configuration path needs—and has been ignored, violated, or only partially implemented, since forever. [0]: https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir/latest/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stuff like that is also cool (reminds me a bit of modding some games), patching machine code to improve performance of a compiled app? Very cool! (My dad might have done that, he has an old ZX81) But I thought specifically patching something to configure it is such a weird concept that I never would have thought of.
The line between "configuration" and "modding" is pretty thin. One could say that the difference is whether the developers intended the changes you're making to be possible or not, but what about programs with dedicated modding APIs?
1979, sure. 1973? Way too early…
I'm confused by the CP/M reference. Author says it'll be important later then proceeds to explain how it had nothing to do with CP/M or the 8080 CPU.
I'm confused by the CP/M reference. Author says it'll be important later then proceeds to explain how it had nothing to do with CP/M or the 8080 CPU.
could you quote the text you are referring to?