Re: [dev] XDG directories

On 12 Jun 2010, at 11:56, Kris Maglione wrote:

> On Sat, Jun 12, 2010 at 12:45:40PM +0200, Martin Kopta wrote:
>> On Sat, Jun 12, 2010 at 10:48:27AM +0200, Jakub Lach wrote:
>>> > $ ls -d .* | wc -l
>>> > 37
>>> > $ ls -ld $HOME
>>> > dr-x------ 27 dum8d0g users ...
>>> > > $ ls -d .* | wc -l
>>> 47
>>> $ ls -ld $HOME
>>> drwxrwx--- 40 user ...
>>
>> How do you prevent dotfiles/dotdirs beeing created?
>
> My guess would be either rm(1) or not using crappy apps (although
> admittedly some of the least crappy apps clutter your home directory
> with them). Even with cleaning out useless dot-files every few
> months, I still wind up with hundreds, though.

I hate to say this, but I'd say when my home dir was at its worst
maybe 30% of the dot-files were produced by window managers. That's
really fairly normal for me, every so often I'll try out a whole slew
of WMs and forget about the dot-files until later. I can't see how
putting the files in another dir will help, whether that dir
is .config or lib or Library/Application\ Support. I'm starting to
really appreciate apps which aren't configurable, but I do miss window-
match actions in my WM.

I somewhat support compiling config into the binary as dwm does. I had
dwm's source dir in ~ for easy access to its config, and /usr/local/
bin/dwm was either a symlink or a 2-line script (I forget which)
launching the executable from the source dir. That's about as
convenient as it could be, but from a user perspective it was nowhere
near as sane as, say, Enlightenment where you right-click on the title
bar, go through a couple of submenus, and click "remember workspace"
or whatever.

My latest thought on the subject is perhaps each app should have its
own dir where it stores everything, but I haven't given that any real
thought yet. I was trying to take into account other issues such as
the man page namespace too. Maybe I'll give it some thought later.

-- 
Do not specify what the computer should do for you, ask what the  
computer can do for you.