Re: (REPOST) user-specific package configuration information
Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
[ standardizing ~/.etc or similar ]
> My sense is that it's probably better to deal with this for new
> applications than to ask existing applications to change the ways
> things are done.
This is a good point. But I do feel strongly that something that
standardizes the ~/.-files is necessary:
[jschauma@www jschauma]$ ls -d1 .* | wc -l
223
[jschauma@www jschauma]$
While existing applications may not necessarily follow a standardization
for ~/.-files immediately, it would certainly prevent more clutter in my
$HOME.
Another good point that was brought up was that packages expect to work
across different unices, not just Linux. Again, this would only apply
to older, existing applications - new applications could work the same
with the new ~/.-files on all unices.
The more new applications adopt this style, the more likely it is that
developers of existing applications might consider changing their
conf-files-locations in the next release.
> And for new applications, many of which will be GUI applications for
> GNOME and KDE, it's probably best that configuarion issues be
> standardized as part of the GNOME and KDE projects.
~/.gnome and ~/.kde already attempt to keep clutter out of $HOME, and
these are unlikely to change. And IMHO it would certainly be acceptable
to have ~/.gnome, ~/.kde and ~/.other.
Applications that access ~/.-files that are not exclusive to the
application (such as newsreaders relying on ~/.newsrc) are using an
interchangable file-format - these files should probably remain in
$HOME, but all other files should go into a different directory. Take
the newsreader "slrn" for example. It's ".slrnrc" should NOT be in
$HOME, but rather ~/.other/slrn-version/slrnrc - all other files that
might be needed by slrn should go there as well, even if created by the
user (such as .score, macros.sl, signature1, signature2 etc).
Currently, I keep these files also in $HOME and only now do I wonder why
I do that instead of creating a separate directory. The problem is that
by all applications barfing into $HOME users feel like all the files
*should* go there, which is stupid.
Just my $localCurrency->{$smallAmount}
-Jan
--
Jan Schaumann
http://www.netmeister.org
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