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From: Christopher Browne <cbbrowne@gmail.com>
To: "Michael Kjörling" <michael@kjorling.se>
Cc: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org
Subject: Re: [TUHS] A question about ls(1)
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2019 16:44:59 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAFNqd5UPm_U22wYda5HjVQRQiM_85fq5JLR+24Y0NteipQ99Og@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20190429180512.q2jrlsyhvb7cx4ev@h-174-65.A328.priv.bahnhof.se>

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On Mon, 29 Apr 2019 at 14:15, Michael Kjörling <michael@kjorling.se> wrote:

> 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.
>

That's application-specific, not distribution or OS specific.

I have 58 subdirectories of ~/.config on my workstation at work; that's not
deviating much from your case; 58 directories (indicating about 58 apps),
2047 subdirectories, 7422 files, 481MB of data, the largest bits being
cache data for Google Chrome web browser.


> 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.
>

I have had little reason to worry about this; I tend to concur.


> > 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.


Yeah, the time they tried doing that, we got "XML everywhere," and
that wasn't a notable improvement.

What you see on mobile devices these days is that the ".config/" file
is a SQLite database, which is where both configuration and application
data are captured.

As someone that spends a great deal of his time writing SQL code,
I find that not too heinous; others might disagree.  I think having a
SQLite file is better than getting some heinous XML file.
(Especially if the XML file is some thinly disguised serialization of
a hierarchy of COM objects, where modifying element order would be
liable to make your Windows application blow up.)

The "mobile platforms" have gotten quite a lot of milage out of using
SQLite databases (true both on Android and on iOS); there could
be worse things.

The SQLite web site does have a page somewhat proselytizing
this:  https://sqlite.org/appfileformat.html

I heard D Richard Hipp (author of SQLite, now head of the dev team)
explain this at PGCon 5 years ago <
https://www.pgcon.org/2014/schedule/events/736.en.html>

He also contended that the world might be a better place if LibreOffice
documents were captured as SQLite databases rather than being bundles of
XML stored in a .zip archive.  That's a nice lively argument to have.
Actually poke at the slides at PGCon 2014; he makes similar arguments
about git repos (what if metadata were in a database?) and ePub book
files.

If we were going to forcibly shoehorn everything into one thing, I think I'd
rather that than a lot of the alternatives.  But I'm admittedly excessively
comfortable with SQL ;-)

I can live with us having a number of data formats, particularly if
they remain simple.
-- 
When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"

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  parent reply	other threads:[~2019-04-29 20:45 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
2019-04-29 20:37       ` Warner Losh
2019-04-29 20:44       ` Christopher Browne [this message]
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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