Re: Updating the recommendations for user configuration files (Policy chapter 9)
"Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals (RainCT)" <sgevatter@debian.org> writes:
> Policy section 9.1.1 (File System Structure) [0] talks about per-user
> configuration files and says: «It is recommended that such files start
> with the '.' character (a "dot file"), and if an application needs to
> create more than one dot file then the preferred placement is in a
> subdirectory with a name starting with a '.' character, (a "dot
> directory")».
> As you probably know, there is now a trend [2][3] of placing all
> configuration files into the same directory, which defaults to
> ~/.config/ but can be changed, as well as two separate directories for
> user data and recoverable/non-important data (~/.local/share,
> ~/.cache). This is described in the XDG Base Directory specification
> [1], and I believe it is a big advancement in terms of cleaning up the
> mess that home directories have become and has the added benefit of
> separating data you may want to backup (config, data) from random junk
> (cache).
I think it's going to be very difficult to do this through Policy. This
would mean Debian-specific patches to a *LOT* of software. Usually we
only put things like this into Policy once they're almost entirely
adopted already, to clean up the stragglers. The best approach with this
sort of thing would be to try to convince upstreams first, so that Debian
doesn't have to create microforks of practically everything.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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