alt Hacker NewsIf 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.
Replies
tremon • yesterday at 3:34 PM
I don't see much difference between a program littering in ~/.app versus littering in ~/.config/app, ~/.local/share/app , ~/.local/state/app and ~/.cache/app
➕ show 1 reply
skydhash • yesterday at 12:54 PM
I don’t mind ~/.* for config, especially when the config is just one or two files. What I don’t like is programs like go and cargo treating my $HOME as a dumping ground for every file they want to download and/or cache.
➕ show 2 replies
user3939382 • yesterday at 12:01 PM
I contemplated for years and eventually saw someone implement a transparent kernel redirect for programs reaching for ~/.*
I wonder how many apps actually read the correct XDG environment variables and obey them, versus just hardcoding paths that match their machine’s config paths (typically ~/.config/*)
I almost want to set up a VM that sets up XDG_CONFIG_HOME as ~/.foobar and see how many apps actually respect it, and how many still write to ~/.config.