Differences between version 5 and predecessor to the previous major change of DotFile.
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| Newer page: | version 5 | Last edited on Monday, February 1, 2010 12:30:39 pm | by LawrenceDoliveiro | Revert |
| Older page: | version 4 | Last edited on Monday, February 1, 2010 12:22:40 pm | by LawrenceDoliveiro | Revert |
@@ -3,6 +3,10 @@
Examples of DotFile~s can be seen in SampleConfigFiles.
Unfortunately, dotfiles have led to the chronic phenomenon of __dotfile clutter__. Do an <tt>[ls|ls(1)] -lA</tt> on a typical user’s home directory, and you will likely see dozens of names beginning with dots. This has a few unfortunate effects:
-* Lack of privacy. If the user wants to make some files readable to other users on the machine, those files have to be put in a directory which is readable by those other users. But in order to access that directory, its parent directory also has to be readable by those users. And its parent, as appropriate, and so on right up the user’s home directory—the one containing all these dotfiles. So other users can at least see the names of those dotfiles, if not their contents, and thereby deduce what applications it’s likely you’re using.
+* Lack of privacy. If the user wants to make some files readable to other users on the machine, those files have to be put in a directory which is readable by those other users. But in order to access that directory, its parent directory also has to be readable by those users. And its parent, as appropriate, and so on right up the user’s home directory—the one containing all these dotfiles. So other users can at least see the names of those dotfiles, if not their contents, and thereby deduce what applications it’s likely you’re using. And it’s surprising how many of these items are created world-readable, so other users ''can'' see their contents
.
* Untidiness. Anything the user wants to create, has to be found by starting from the top level of their home directory. So at this top level, you have a whole bunch of items mixed together, some created explicitly by the user, others implicitly by apps run by the user. Yes, directory-listing utilities commonly offer the option to hide dotfiles and just show the others, but the opposite option seems a little harder to achieve.
+
+For these reasons, it seems a good idea to give the user more control over where these preference files are created. The only serious proposal I know of is the [XDG Base Directory Specification|http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/latest/]. This says that user prefs should be created in the directory specified by the EnvironmentVariable <tt>XDG_CONFIG_HOME</tt>. If this is not defined, then the prefs should go in the directory <tt>$HOME/.config/</tt>. The directory should be created if it doesn’t exist, to be readable and writable by the owner but inaccessible to anyone else.
+
+Thus, all the dotfile clutter is replaced by a single dotted-directory name, and the user has the option of overriding even this. Much cleaner overall, don’t you agree?
