Re: $HOME/.dotfiles and FHS 2.3 (was: Comparing FHS 2.3 and 2.1)

["Marcelo E. Magallon" <mmagallo@debian.org>]

On Fri, Oct 29, 2004 at 04:53:29PM +0200, Frank Küster wrote:

 > >     * bash reads and writes a number of files in ~/ (.bash_profile,
 > >       .bashrc, .bash_history)
 > >     * there are several directories related to GNOME (at least ~/.gnome2
 > >       and ~/.gnome2_private)
 > >     * vim has ~/.vimrc, ~/.viminfo (configure IIRC), ~/.vim/
 > 
 > They should probably use their own directory in the future. I think
 > this would really be a good idea.

 I don't think so.  It's a matter of interoperability.  If the guys
 writing the FHS don't care about this it's their problem, but I've
 worked for many years in environments where my home is shared among
 computers with different operating systems (e.g. Linux, IRIX, HP/UX and
 Solaris), and the prospect of increasing complexity in order to
 accommodate something like the FHS doesn't appeal to me.  I _do_ split
 things like .bash_profile across several files in ~/.bash/.
 Nevertheless I know that bash reads ~/.bashrc; introducing something
 that deviates from this on some platforms buys the user little benefit.

 By the way, you can get rid of ~/.viminfo by adding n~/.vim/viminfo to
 viminfo.

 > >     * Window Maker stores its configuration across several files and
 > >       directories under ~/GNUstep (configurable) (and no, I won't change
 > >       the default because it's configurable via an environment variable)
 > 
 > I was always annoyed by this, and it's not easy to find the solution
 > in the documentation (I only learned of the environment variable in
 > this thread). Why not change the default, when everybody can get back
 > the original buggy behavior by setting an environment variable?

 It's in the manual page:

       GNUSTEP_USER_ROOT
              specifies   the   initial   path  for  the  Defaults
              directory.  "Defaults/" is appended to this variable to
              determine the actual location  of  the  databases.  If
              the  varialbe  is not set, it defaults to "~/GNUstep"

 patches to improve wording or make it easier to understand (or for that
 matter, to add a whole new section to the manpage if you think that's
 the solution) are always welcomed.

 I guess something like this would work:

    if test -z "$GNUSTEP_USER_ROOT" ; then
        if test -d "$HOME/GNUstep" ; then
            GNUSTEP_USER_ROOT="$HOME/GNUstep"
        else
            GNUSTEP_USER_ROOT="$HOME/.GNUstep"
    fi

 but I have the same interoperatibility problem again.  This deviates
 from the upstream default behaviour.

 Marcelo