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Dotfile madness

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Re: Dotfile madness

#411

Post by saagarjha »

skinnymuch wrote: post #325
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.

You can use https://github.com/JK3Y/asepsis to have them all redirected to one folder. So not have them in every folder. That’s forked from the project originally being by TotalFinder’s creator as far as I know.

A couple of caveats: one, it seems to inject into other processes, which is not something you want to do with System Integrity Protection enabled, and two you need to run touch ~/.no-asepsis-os-restriction to make this work :)

Re: Dotfile madness

#412

Post by eeeeeeeeeeeee »

godot wrote: post #84
avip wrote: post #43

node_modules and yarn.lock etc. in the location where the tool was run is a feature, not a bug. Ask any python user digging to find where pip decided to drop it this time.

I was going to say, I've been actively working with nodejs for a few years and I've never had node_modules, package-lock.json and yarn.lock in my home dir, on either Linux or macOS. If you run npm/yarn commands in your home dir for some reasons, then you should expect those files there. On the less than handful of times where I ran npm in my home dir accidentally, I make sure to immediately go and delete those files.…

I think most of that can be chalked up to someone simply mistakenly running those commands in the wrong directory (root of $HOME). I've never heard of a JS app just randomly storing a global node_modules or yarn.lock to the root of $HOME.

Re: Dotfile madness

#413

Post by saagarjha »

eeeeeeeeeeeee wrote: post #405
sakoht wrote: post #252

The real problem is that any app I run accesss all files I own with equal permissions. App1 and App2 shouldn’t write their data to my home, or read each other’s data, or, please, be able to write each other’s data. A video game can read my tax forms. WTF. Mobile & tablet OSs solve this. Everything has to follow. Until then, basically every app should run in a docker container. Then it can do what it wants.

It seems like MacOS has been headed in this direction, at least with the App Store apps. But it's a hard problem to elegantly implement without breaking everything. I still see a lot of Mac apps that basically say "disable system protection first."

I have seen very few apps that do this now, mostly because it's getting harder to make users do this so apps have started to give up.

Re: Dotfile madness

#414

Post by eeeeeeeeeeeee »

saagarjha wrote: post #413
eeeeeeeeeeeee wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like MacOS has been headed in this direction, at least with the App Store apps. But it's a hard problem to elegantly implement without breaking everything. I still see a lot of Mac apps that basically say "disable system protection first."

I have seen very few apps that do this now, mostly because it's getting harder to make users do this so apps have started to give up.

Yep, it's definitely older apps that have been around longer and the dev isn't as active with it.

Re: Dotfile madness

#415

Post by krferriter »

akerro wrote: post #207
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…

cmake, conky, dlv, electron, electrum, gnome, gnutls, gradle, idea, ipfs, kde, maven, npm, ohmyzsh, sonar, steam, thunderbird, veracrypt, vim, visualvm, vscode, yarn. and now the most fun: bash, zsh, git, gtk, man, wget, xorg

I'd tend to give a pass to things like shells (bash, zsh) and ssh and gpg. Not the other ones though.

Re: Dotfile madness

#416

Post by jimmaswell »

int_19h wrote: post #328
ljm wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This strongly reminds me of installing software on Windows, where most games and programs would use My Documents as a dumping ground.

Windows actually has the same dotfile infestation problem these days. I mean, you still get stuff in Documents that shouldn't be there, but on top of that you get apps - often Unix ports - that believe that %USERPROFILE% (i.e. one folder above Documents) is the appropriate place for their configs and such (it's not - that should also go into AppData\Local or \Roaming as needed). And they usually use a dot-prefixed na…

On Windows, you could move the configs elsewhere, make a symlink to them in the old place, and mark the symlink as hidden so you don't see it in explorer. Too bad this can't work on Linux because the hidden-state is encoded in the filename.

Re: Dotfile madness

#417

Post by jimmaswell »

sixothree wrote: post #307
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 is not okay for some application to store files in My Documents folder. If it's not MY document then it doesn't belong in My Documents. The user folder exists for a reason. Drop your crap in there.

It hasn't been "My Documents" since Windows XP. It's just "Documents" now, so if we're taking the name literally, then any document can go there.

Re: Dotfile madness

#418

Post by smallstepforman »

Pxtl wrote: post #168
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.

That's a killer idea. I hope somebody will reise to the challenge of a filesystem with such a feature.

BeFileSystem (Haiku) HFS+ and APFS Even NTFS has attributes.

The problem is file manager. Tracker/Finder are several steps ahead of Explorer. Under Linux, its a greater mess even though there are no technical limitations.

Re: Dotfile madness

#419

Post by jimmaswell »

sakoht wrote: post #252

The real problem is that any app I run accesss all files I own with equal permissions. App1 and App2 shouldn’t write their data to my home, or read each other’s data, or, please, be able to write each other’s data. A video game can read my tax forms. WTF. Mobile & tablet OSs solve this. Everything has to follow. Until then, basically every app should run in a docker container. Then it can do what it wants.

Has this ever been a problem in practice for you or is it all theoretical? The tradeoff doesn't seem worth it to me.

Re: Dotfile madness

#420

Post by Something1234 »

chmln wrote: post #317
rjzzleep wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally don't like xdg. I have bin files from pip and other stuff in ~/.local/bin. I have huge amounts of cache files in both .cache and .config. It's supposed to make my life easier by being able to backup .config and dump everything. but in reality this doesnt happen. Backing up .config for just the user defined configs is a massive PITA. you have to put so many gitignore exceptions and I'm not even talking ab…

> you have to put so many gitignore exceptions and I'm not even talking about the gigs of data all the chromium derivatives put into that folder Yeah but chrome devs half-assing the trivial xdg spec doesn't mean that xdg sucks - its just not implemented properly.

I think xdg has an issue of being obtuse when I googled it a while ago, it was very confusing, and I didn't find any real definitions. However I didn't look that hard.
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