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Dotfile madness

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Re: Dotfile madness

#261

Post by fwip »

bennofs wrote: post #108
megous wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can at least ignore read events, not sure about separating write from creation.

Re: Dotfile madness

#262

Post by gumby »

CGamesPlay wrote: post #254
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…

> These people are arrogant shitheads and I’d like to know who they are so I can avoid their software. Wow, this is really assuming the worst in people. It’s much more likely to be ignorance because the other developer doesn’t know where the file came from either (some compiler flag on a library accidentally enabled), or also doesn’t ls -a in their home.

> Wow, this is really assuming the worst in people.

Yes, I am. I'm fed up with programs that spam my system without asking: install plug ins, menu items, directories on the desktop, dock items etc for "convenience" -- it's convenient for them, not me. It's especially painful when I pay for an app and it sprays shrapnel through my filesystem.

> It’s much more likely to be ignorance

Indeed, but if they can't be bothered to learn basic system hygiene how can I be confident the rest of their package is safe to use?

A big driver for sandbox/containers in user systems is not protection against malign actors per se but against the lazy and ignorant.

Have I written bugs into code? Of course I have, I'm human. But at least I try to get things right up front; to be a good citizen.

(there are additional reasons for containers in server systems, hence my qualification of "user systems" above).

Re: Dotfile madness

#263

Post by tinco »

empath75 wrote: post #257
tinco wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other people's code shouldn't be in my $HOME if I didn't put it there explicitly. If it's part of the dependencies of a project, it should be either in a cache directory of that particular project, or in the cache directory of the build tool (that preferably conforms to XDG), like all sane build tools do. GOPATH is an incomplete (thus incorrect) solution to a problem that was being solved correctly and completely in…

Ruby dependency and version management is as much a clusterfuck as any other language, imo.

In my comment I say that it's better than the way Go did it, and Go is switching to the Ruby style, so maybe you could add some kind of argument why it's actually not better than that in any other language?

I can't remember the last time I had a version management problem in Ruby, though the ecosystem is so stable right now not many backwards incompatible things happen any more.

Re: Dotfile madness

#264

Post by pseudalopex »

miguelmota wrote: post #238

What's the equivalent of $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS for macOS and Windows?

macOS has Application Support, Caches, and Preferences folders under /System/Library, /Library, and ~/Library. Windows has %ProgramData%, %AppData%, and %LocalAppData%.

Re: Dotfile madness

#265

Post by TeMPOraL »

lgeorget wrote: post #106
nine_k wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

I'd love something like this on program level. Given contents of a variable, I'd like to know where they came from - which pieces of code contributed to the result. I'd also love to be able to mark a piece of data, and see what code touched it or derived new data from it. A programming equivalent of injecting radioisotopes into the body.

Re: Dotfile madness

#266

Post by Varriount »

dmitrygr wrote: post #225
chrisweekly wrote: post #195

Related pet peeve: macOs '.DS_Store' files. Can someone better-informed than me please explain how to prevent heir creation? Barring that, I'd settle for a justification.

How else do you propose storing xattrs on fat32?

Just don't? Besides, .DS_Store files are created on non-FAT filesystems too, even when the filesystem does support extended attributes.

Re: Dotfile madness

#267

Post by Dayshine »

SpaceManiac wrote: post #242
user5994461 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fair to store documents and saved games in My Documents. Much better than storing them in C:\Windows or C:\Program Files, as was the case a decade ago, before windows introduced UAC and blocked write access to these.

It's senseless to store files that don't have user-facing meaning in My Documents. I know games that use it varyingly for web caches, shader caches, binary config files, debug logs, Lua scripts, downloaded mods, and even executables . And while arguably most gamers understand what save files are , they can't be double-clicked to open them, so I don't consider them documents (Maybe this is pedantic). All this kind of…

Save games is a poor example.

Users often need to back them up. Backup systems often include Documents by default but not AppData.

Files in AppData are hidden, and you would not expect users to find them.

Further, many save games can be opened with a text editor just fine :)

Re: Dotfile madness

#268

Post by spockz »

darkpuma wrote: post #165
nine_k wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Associating tags with files is straight forward. What's not quite so straight forward is how you query the system. The worst implementations of file tagging only implement retrieving a list of all files that have a given tag. Slightly better than this are tagging systems that will return the intersection between two or more tags. Most tag systems never go beyond this. Going slightly further, tag exclusions are powerf…

Wasn’t this the whole idea and purpose of the successor to NTFS which was supposed to ship with Longhorn/Vista? What happened there?

Re: Dotfile madness

#270

Post by MereInterest »

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.

Don't forget when EA couldn't even spell their own name correctly, and made a folder named "Electrontic Arts".
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