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Dotfile madness

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Re: Dotfile madness

#391

Post by zapzupnz »

dkarl wrote: post #377

This smacks of somebody looking for a problem. If it's not a problem when you don't look, and you have to go out of your way to look, how is it a problem? Anything where your own way of seeing it creates the problem, and you can't describe the problem any other way, you're not ready to pitch it as a problem to other people. Find some harm independent of your perception, and then you've got a reason for people to list…

They've explained why it's a problem. Having an alternative viewpoint on "why programs are randomly polluting my home folder, a sensitive location with my personal data, with unwanted files without leaving any trace of their origin" isn't going to help.

Re: Dotfile madness

#392

Post by h1d »

ChrisSD wrote: post #298
Dayshine wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

As noted below there's a special folder called "Saved Games" that's specifically meant for this purpose. A lot of games still don't use it.

Why did they have to narrow it down to games? Could just go with "Saved config (and data)", so other apps could just dump small config files which can be effectively backed up.

Re: Dotfile madness

#393

Post by h1d »

chii wrote: post #370
ChrisSD wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough but on multi-user systems you can surely see the value in separate save game folders?

when was the last time a gaming machine is a multi-user system?!

Since when every person in a house has their own gaming PC?

Re: Dotfile madness

#394

Post by zapzupnz »

otterley wrote: post #123
withinboredom wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You cannot and should never assume that dotfiles are just preference files. They might be directories, and those directories might be chock full of big files — or worse, temp files that should really be in /tmp.

Re: Dotfile madness

#395

Post by h1d »

user5994461 wrote: post #320
wongarsu wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand not backing up AppData/Local, but everything in AppData/Roaming is supposedly important enough to sync it over the network (if you use domains or another mechanism to give you the same Windows account on multiple computers). Any default policy which doesn't back up AppData/Roaming seems ill advised.

It's ill advised to synchronize game saves by default. Quite a few popular games generate gigabytes of saves. My witcher saves were 10GB, until I realize that problem and deleted them, no wounder backups were slow. Skyrim is not that far off. Pretty sure backup is already integrated in steam for these two games.

I don't know what they save but 10GB is surely not purely saved games. It's those games fault not about 'saving saved games by default'.

Re: Dotfile madness

#396

Post by [deleted] »

h1d wrote: post #392
ChrisSD wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As noted below there's a special folder called "Saved Games" that's specifically meant for this purpose. A lot of games still don't use it.

Why did they have to narrow it down to games? Could just go with "Saved config (and data)", so other apps could just dump small config files which can be effectively backed up.

[deleted]

Re: Dotfile madness

#397

Post by h1d »

jamiepenney wrote: post #351
SpaceManiac wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I haven't used My Documents for documents for years now. The directory is useless because of all the cruft, I store useful things elsewhere now.

My Documents meant as /var/tmp to me ever since it existed. Never put my own files there.

Re: Dotfile madness

#400

Post by airstrike »

wongarsu wrote: post #284
marcosdumay wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python did this until very recently too. Windows has a problem, because people expect to use those programs in the command line and the %PATH% has a size limit and is a bit difficult to set-up properly.

The sum of the length of all environment variables has to be below 32767 characters. That doesn't seem like a good excuse to save 14 characters by putting your program's folder in C:/ instead of C:/Program Files/ If you do deeply nested paths (as npm used to do) then you can run against the old MAX_PATH limit that limits paths to 260 characters, but the correct solution is to either choose a flatter directory structu…

C:\ isn't protected by UAC like C:\Program Files, though
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