AureumTempusWhy does OpenSSH not conform with XDG_CONFIG? Can there be alternatives?
LungXDG config was always a smooth brain idea, and any other outcome of this experiment was always ~impossible (of course some apps didn’t switch …)
Great job to X “fixing” what didn’t need fixing, and causing us to go from one unified system that made sense, to two. And now people don’t even want to use X anymore
Having a consistent base directory specification is a “smooth brain idea”? Alright, buddy, enjoy your config and cache files scattered around your user directories.
My “user directories”? You mean you have more than one $HOME with dotfiles in it?
It was never a problem to find user specific app data on unix. And XDG obviously didn’t solve it because solutions that require everyone to change their code are dumb. Case in point, this thread
My “user directories”? You mean you have more than one $HOME with dotfiles in it?
I meant directories under your $HOME.
The problem isn’t that finding files is difficult, but that a lack of specifications leads to inconsistencies and programs doing whatever they want under your home directory.
That worked fine for Unix because programs were designed to be simple. It doesn’t work today where you have programs that constantly save temporary files, caches, and data derived from user input.
You used to have to do all that stuff before too. Vim has had history, settings, caching, and plugins for ever. And it all used to sit in ~/.vim. Now it’s in ~/.config/vim. What’s the difference?
Consistency and separation.
If I need to clear out any caches or temporary files, I don’t need to dig around in a bunch of dot-directories to figure out what’s safe to delete and what’s a configuration file. I can wholesale rm -rf ~/.cache.
It’s also convenient for distro hopping or backing up files. If every program kept temporary and transient files in the same base directory, you would need filters for each of them. For anything conforming to XDG base directory specifications, different types of files are all under well-known directories.
More subjectively, I hold the opinion that my home directory is mine. Programs shouldn’t be littering the root of my user folder with their crap (looking at you, ~/go).
All in all, XDG base directories solve a problem that isn’t covered in any other specification. If POSIX defined a similar specification, such as having config files relegated to ~/.local/etc/some-program, I wouldn’t be here.
Shit y’know what, fair enough. I never had your particular needs, and I’d probably still have to double check a cache location in case the app didn’t comply, but I feel you