From: "Michael Kjörling" <michael@kjorling.se>
To: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org
Subject: Re: [TUHS] A question about ls(1)
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2019 18:05:12 +0000 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20190429180512.q2jrlsyhvb7cx4ev@h-174-65.A328.priv.bahnhof.se> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <D239CD94-F1BA-47B0-9E16-4F67C09C5CEA@bitblocks.com>
On 28 Apr 2019 13:00 -0700, from bakul@bitblocks.com (Bakul Shah):
> IMHO separate files are fine but it would've been nice to
> a) have a place other than $HOME to store these files and
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.
> b) a standardized plain text format
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@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)
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2019-04-29 18:14 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 23+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2019-04-28 16:54 Norman Wilson
2019-04-28 19:45 ` Jon Forrest
2019-04-28 20:00 ` Bakul Shah
2019-04-29 18:05 ` Michael Kjörling [this message]
2019-04-29 20:37 ` Warner Losh
2019-04-29 20:44 ` Christopher Browne
2019-04-30 6:44 ` Michael Kjörling
2019-04-30 7:24 ` Kurt H Maier
2019-04-30 10:35 ` Wesley Parish
2019-04-29 22:32 ` Bakul Shah
2019-04-30 11:52 ` Theodore Ts'o
2019-04-28 22:16 ` Thoma Paulsen
2019-04-29 0:53 ` John P. Linderman
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2019-04-27 23:03 Noel Chiappa
2019-04-27 20:11 Norman Wilson
2019-04-27 14:16 Anthony Martin
2019-04-27 15:38 ` Warner Losh
2019-04-27 15:42 ` Larry McVoy
2019-04-28 23:59 ` Warner Losh
2019-04-28 11:47 ` Dan Cross
2019-04-28 12:00 ` arnold
2019-04-28 14:44 ` jcs
2019-04-28 16:15 ` Bakul Shah
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