Re: [TUHS] A question about ls(1)

On 28 Apr 2019 13:00 -0700, from bakul(a)bitblocks.com (Bakul Shah): XDG already does that. At least Norman already mentioned ~/.config in this thread. https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/xdg-user-dirs/ Not sure how common that is on non-Linux systems, but it seems pretty common on modern Linux distributions. My workstation Debian system has a staggering 3467 files in that directory, spread around 444 directories (75 directories directly under ~/.config). Plus another 142 dot-directories and 66 dotfiles in ~/. Now, ~/.config typically uses multiple files per application, and at a glance there's some stuff there that could definitely go, but I still shudder to think of having all of those directly under ~/, so it's clearly doing _some_ good in that regard. And that's to not even begin to talk about all the stuff you'll find in /etc on a modern Linux system. I'm not sure about that; different applications have very different needs, and trying to shoehorn one into another would be ugly; quite possibly even more ugly than just having different formats. Imagine trying to write mail sorting recipies (think procmail) in a file with the same format as that of one holding word processor settings or an image metadata store. I guess that's half-way tolerable on Windows because next to nobody edits the settings directly anyway, but on a system where many such files are sometimes, or often, edited directly by the user, it might well hinder more than it helps. I guess you _could_ go with something like XML or JSON, but that's a bit like saying "all cars should have an engine and a refillable fuel store", in that it doesn't actually standardize anything _meaningful_ (in both of those cases, the magic is in the schema, not the format). Lists of examples not intended to be exhaustive. -- Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael(a)kjorling.se “The most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person is to think you know what you’re doing.” (Bret Victor)