alt Hacker News> My recollection is that most CP/M programs were configured via patching.
I honestly would have liked that better for a lot of programs than the dotfiles they litter all over my home directory.
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Part of the philosophy of the slightly odd suckless people is their projects are mostly configured by changing the source code and recompiling. This is I suppose a similar approach in a modern open source vein. Although their general asceticism makes their projects a bit of an acquired taste I suspect.
Well, they are supposed to be all in .config, problem is many app developers think they are special little boys that deserve its own directory
I'll take dotfiles I can grep and mange with a text editor over settings littered all over a central binary registry. But maybe that's just what I'm used to.
Yea this is something I'd love to see standardised, a distro that was able to enforce a .config folder somehow would be a winner for me. Think weve probably missed the boat though.
You would've preferred binary patching of the executable? Really?
If people just followed the XDG Base Directory Specification, config file littering would be a non-issue. More and more projects adopt it, even holdouts like Firefox.