On Wed, 27 Jul 2011 15:54:09 +0200
Lennart Poettering <mzerqung(a)0pointer.de> wrote:
On Wed, 27.07.11 10:30, Karel Zak (kzak(a)redhat.com) wrote:
> > Note that there are a number of 3rd party projects making use of
> > ~/.config/bin afaik, including jhbuild which installs its
> > executable to that dir.
>
> It would be nice to clean up $HOME, radically reduce the number of
> the subdirectories and config files in the $HOME. If *all* the
> garbage will be in ~/local/{etc,bin,lib,var/log} then nobody will
> care if the directory is hidden. My wish is
>
> $ ls -ls ~/
> drwxrwxr-x. 31 kzak kzak 4096 Jul 26 15:54 .
> drwxrwxr-x. 13 kzak kzak 4096 Jul 26 15:49 ..
> drwxr-xr-x 2 kzak kzak 4096 Jul 26 15:54 local
>
> and nothing other, .mozilla, vimrc, bash_profile, .xsession-errors,
> etc. all could be in ~/local, but then the directory should be
> really visible.
Well, for ~/.local we already have a spec and have had it since a
couple of years, and it is implemented in KDE and in GNOME.
If you don't hide ~/.local and ~/.config then users who are less savvy
than us might wonder what thzat stuff is and delete it and nothing
will stop them and then all their configuration is lost.
Hiding configuration is one thing, hiding executables is another. Hiding
executables is a security risk, and should not be done just because
a single person asked for it in a BZ.
I think the discussion where to place this is moot anyway, as the spec
has been written years ago and widely (though not universally)
implemented, and we should just stick to it, since where it to place
it is nothing more than bike shedding anyway.
There are 173 hidden directories in my $HOME, none of which I put there
manually. 2 of these are .config and .local.
So I would say the spec is more widely ignored than it is being
implemented.
--
Bernd Stramm
bernd.stramm(a)gmail.com