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Dotfile madness

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Re: Dotfile madness

#471

Post by user5994461 »

zingmars wrote: post #450
h1d wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'.

Nope, Witcher 1 saves are just really large (for some reason in addition to all the flags they also contain some locale data and such). 10GiB is actually pretty reasonable for a Witcher playthrough.

It's similar in the Witcher 2, 3 and Skyrim. The saves start small and they grow to 10MB as you progress in the game. I guess there is a lot of world state and items to hold in an RPG. Count a few hundred saves, manual or autosave and that's a lot of space.

In the witcher 1 there is also an uncompressed BMP thumbnail with each save that is about a megabyte. It's PNG compressed in the witcher 2. They learned from their mistake.

Re: Dotfile madness

#472

Post by user5994461 »

ChrisSD wrote: post #358
user5994461 wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair it's widely used now, it just took a while to adopt because of compatibility issues. Finding the directory requires new APIs introduced in Vista and Server 2008. See SHGetKnownFolderPath

Sure but in the non-game software world we'd do a runtime check to see if the OS was Vista or later and fallback if not.

You can't do it as a runtime check. You have to compile the software with the flags to import and link to the latest windows library. The program will hard crash if run on an older version.

I just tried to use the API. I literally couldn't find a working example on the internet in 2 hours so I guess noone figured it out in a decade.

Wrote https://stackoverflow.com/a/54499257/5994461

Re: Dotfile madness

#473

Post by SomeHacker44 »

int_19h wrote: post #432
jimmaswell wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, the hidden-bit on Windows is really semantically equivalent to dot-prefix on Unix, and people set up their file managers to show such files for similar reasons (I don't even use Explorer, mostly). In Win10, it's even exposed as a setting in Settings | For Developers

What do you use in lieu of Explorer, out of curiosity?

15 year Mac user (re)exploring Windows due to bad hardware...

Re: Dotfile madness

#474

Post by wongarsu »

airstrike wrote: post #468
wongarsu wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam is doing just fine writing into C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps from an unpriviledged process. It just gives all users full rights over that folder. (whether that's a great idea is a different question, but UAC isn't a problem if you just set your access rights correctly)

This assumes the user had admin privileges to begin with

If the user never had admin priviledges then you can't install in C:\ either and the program should just install in AppData\Local (as my sibling poster correctly stated)

Re: Dotfile madness

#475

Post by recursive »

sneak wrote: post #109
amaccuish wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please no. This article is literally "Dotfile madness", don't make it worse! I have to deal already with these on file shares, specifically for Apple: .DS_Store, .Trashes and .AppleDouble, or for Windows: Thumbs.db, $RECYCLE.BIN (for some reason Windows sometimes ignores the fact I've disabled the recycle bin on a share and creates this instead) and desktop.ini. Please don't drop crap around directories where there e…

How do you have to “deal with” them? What are the portable tidier alternatives?

For me, mostly exclude them from select all, or perhaps scroll past them to see meaningful files.

Re: Dotfile madness

#476

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

ChrisSD wrote: post #331
runxel wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And here I am, still wanting my save files to reside next to the games exe...

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

There's no reason there couldn't be separate per-user folders within the game's installation path for that.

Re: Dotfile madness

#477

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

jorvi wrote: post #342
nycticorax wrote: post #119

To me, the real problem is not the dotfiles, but the regular (i.e. non-hidden) files that applications surreptitiously create in my home folder. (Which the author does mention as being particularly bad.) dotfiles in the home folder are not a new thing on Linux (e.g. .bashrc, .profile, .emacs, etc.), even if it would be better if more applications used the XDG folders. And if I don't see them when I "ls", they don't b…

> And of course, all this is on top of the new fashion for the OS to "helpfully" create Documents, Music, Video, etc folders in my home folder, and set the XDG environment variables to point to them. Noooooope. Yuuuup. It baffles me how Linux users can simultaneously complain that 'its never the year of the Linux desktop' and then at the same time rile against basic usability tenets. The average users wants/needs Doc…

It's always amazing to me how confident random people on the internet are that they know precisely what the average user wants.

Re: Dotfile madness

#478

Post by Pxtl »

smallstepforman wrote: post #418
Pxtl wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was mostly going for a morbid pun, but it's nice to hear that the FS does support this.

Surprising Explorer is so bad at it since they're good at getting EXIF data and ID3 tags into the Properties tab in Explorer.

Re: Dotfile madness

#479

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

nycticorax wrote: post #427
jorvi wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And of course, all this is on top of the new fashion for the OS to "helpfully" create Documents, Music, Video, etc folders in my home folder, and set the XDG environment variables to point to them. Noooooope. Yuuuup. It baffles me how Linux users can simultaneously complain that 'its never the year of the Linux desktop' and then at the same time rile against basic usability tenets. The average users wants/needs Doc…

Well, I know that I hate them. And I know a lot of other people that hate them. And I'm pretty suspicious of 'features' that allegedly make life easier for naive users by definitely making life harder for experienced users. And I guess I would call it a "basic usability tenet" that the computer does what I tell it to. Documents, Music, and Videos folders violate this, because if I do the seemingly-obvious thing of ju…

Damn straight. Where does the system get off trying to tell me how I should organize my stuff? Keep system stuff in a folder for system stuff and the rest of the file hierarchy is mine, because it is my goddamned computer. The original Mac got this right and no one else has since.

Re: Dotfile madness

#480

Post by heinrichhartman »

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.

> basically every app should run in a docker container

Why does it have to be "Docker"? Any other container framework should do as well, no?

Note that systemd can create cgroups and namespaces for processes it manages: http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/security.html

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