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Comment by tedunangst | Hacker News Reader

How is it not arrogant to say to an existing project "I hereby demand you move your config files to .config"?

Huh, who'd have thought it: you can make something sound arrogant by rewriting it to use arrogant language.

When the large majority of developers converges and compromises to reach an agreed-upon standard, it is arrogance to continue to stake it out by oneself, however old said existing project might be.

Real-world equivalent: the imperial system of units dates to ancient Rome or older. The English used it throughout their empire. On the other hand, the SI units in their most modern form are barely a century old, and yet 95% of the Earth's population lives in a fully metricated country. Most metrication efforts happened in the last 50 – 70 years.

> When the large majority of developers converges and compromises to reach an agreed-upon standard, it is arrogance to continue to stake it out by oneself, however old said existing project might be.

Didn't the large majority of developers converge and compromise to stuff dotfiles into my home directory directly? I've got 41 dotfiles in ~, one of which is from the software project known as config, which apparently has settings for glib-2.0?

Of course, I'm not running a desktop environment.

I think the XDG standards are largely good and I wish everyone would adopt them, but it was absolutely not the result of "a large majority of developers" reaching a standard. It was a very small minority.

I don't think the statement that a large majority has converged and reached to an agreed-upon standard is true, given so many aren't following it.

You just decided it was so, on your own.

When the existing project is doing some shit, like writing both config and data to %PROGRAMFILES%.

I'm looking at you, MariaDB and WireGuard.

not adhering to a (reasonably well defined and accepted) standard kind of is a bug to me.

Resolved: the standard is for dot files to go in $HOME.

It is not reasonably well defined, it is even broken by design, and if it was so accepted we wouldn't have this conversation.

Look up how XDG_RUNTIME_DIR gets set. Its a pam_systemd(8) thing and thus specific to GNU/Linux. So if you approach the non-glibc or *BSD folks with "please follow the XDG spec", you will likely not receive a nice answer.

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