Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

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My home directory has dotfiles for aspell, bash, bzr, cargo, Clojure, CPAN, CVS, Darcs, D-BUS, Dillo, DOSBox, DOSEmu, Emacs, Eclipse, Emacs, ESD, FLTK, fontconfig, FontForge, GForth, GHC, the GIMP, Git, GnuPG, Gnuplot, Guix, IceWM, Idle, Java, John the Ripper, Jython, Links2, MilkyTracker, Mozilla (Firefox), MPlayer, Nethack, Octave, Racket, R, Skeinforge, Slic3r, SSH, SQLite, Subversion, Units, Vim, W3M, WINE, X-Windows, XScreenSaver, and zsh, which is 51 "apps". Some of those have been there since last millennium, and it would not improve my user experience for those "apps" to look for my configuration file in two different places, or to stop looking in the place they've been looking for decades.

(God forbid I should use remote CVS again, but if I do, I sure don't want to have to debug where the fuck it's sticking .cvspass now.)

There are another 41 things in .config, including Bitcoin, Calibre, Chromium, DjVuLibre, Gomuks, htop, Inkscape, Mumble, OpenSCAD, Transmission, and other things. If I had to choose, I would say that those are the things "going against the grain of the ecosystem". But I think it's fine. As long as it doesn't change in another ten years to be .Config, or .conf, or Configuration, or either Configuration or Configuración depending on whether I installed the machine in English or Spanish. Because then I am seriously going to look into government surplus cruise missiles.

Yeah I sympathize with you - my goal is for the Linux community to use a system - that is, a well-defined one, not one born arbitrarily out of the (`if (name[0] == ".") file_hidden = true;` code that has since metastasized into an ungodly manifestation of chaos itself. And that good system is the XDG Base Directory Specification. I'm sure as you know, Unix systems in general have a bad history of ad-hoc protocols and conventions, and in the process of correcting for those, somethings going to be disrupted. I've done my part to ensure that a config location that exists will continue to be looked at, but as you mention, it's confusing and increases complexity. I'm sorry, but that is what I'm willing to risk to fix this particular underlying issue.

I do not share your fear of chaos or your faith in rational planning over ad-hoc protocols and conventions. I would prefer that you not attempt to rationalize the operating system I live in. Have you considered that the system you are looking for is perhaps not any kind of Unix, but maybe something like Plan 9, Macintosh System 7, PalmOS, or Oberon?

Instead of lamenting that Unix isn't more like Oberon, and trying to make it more like Oberon, consider that possibly the secret of Unix's success is that its ad-hoc protocols and conventions embody ideas that work very well, so instead of replacing them with untested rational planning, you should try to learn from them. Embrace the chaos.

> it would not improve my user experience for those "apps" to look for my configuration file in two different places

Some of those already do, though. At least Vim and Emacs do, and I personally have zsh in .config as well.

Yeah, Emacs looking in both .emacs and .emacs.d has been a headache from time to time.

Isn't .emacs.d still in your $HOME? I thought the path was $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/emacs

Oh, is it doing that too, now? Ugh. Three possibilities is worse than two.

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