[fhs-discuss] Split home directory for each user into two parts

Roger Leigh rleigh at codelibre.net
Fri May 6 01:18:40 PDT 2011


On Fri, May 06, 2011 at 10:32:32AM +1000, Karl Goetz wrote:
> On Thu, 5 May 2011 07:26:21 -0400
> Randy Kramer <rhkramer at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > I'm just going to state this without very much support at first.  I 
> > haven't looked in bugzilla to see if this is already there.
> > 
> > I think it would help lots of people (obviously, myself) if the ~ 
> > directory for each user was split into two parts.  (This could be
> > done in a variety of ways, more below.)
> 
> I can see the benefit of splitting out various classes of data (eg
> config/state/cache), but I'm not sure what problem entirely new
> directories are trying to solve that a few top level . dirs in homes
> wouldn't solve?
[...]
> Freedesktop XDG people are moving lots of stuff in the home directory
> around, including configs into .config, .local. perhaps you should have
> a look at what they're doing there.

I was never entirely sure why .config was picked over a visible name,
e.g. "etc".  Having installed a few packages with "--prefix=$HOME",
I have a set of TLDs e.g. etc, bin, lib.  Replicating the TLDs makes
some logical sense since configuration files are names consistently
irrespective of the path, as well as additionally making life easier
for the programmer (no special-casing needed for dotfiles).  So I have,
for example:

% ls etc                  
bash_logout   gitconfig  irssi            procmailrc    ssh
bash_profile  gitk       ispell_british   reportbugrc   tkcvs
bashrc        gnupg      ispell_default   Rprofile      vimrc
[...]
fetchmailrc   inkscape   openoffice.org2  spamassassin  zshrc

with the dotfiles in ~ being symlinks at present due to lack of
application support.

Of course, it's possible to do this today with XDG-using programs
with "XDG_CONFIG_HOME=$HOME/etc".

As was noted in another post, the effort to move away from dotfiles
in ~ to another location is a large task which will take a lot of
time and effort.  However, despite this it is a worthy goal for
security, consistency, keeping configuration in a VCS, and general
usability (users can actually find the configuration files should
they be unaware that dotfiles are hidden by default).  At the very
least the FHS could recommend the use of XDG via XDG_CONFIG_HOME
to avoid further pollution of ~ with dotfiles, if it is not
feasible to recommend a particular subdirectory for the storage of
configuration files.


Regards,
Roger

-- 
  .''`.  Roger Leigh
 : :' :  Debian GNU/Linux             http://people.debian.org/~rleigh/
 `. `'   Printing on GNU/Linux?       http://gutenprint.sourceforge.net/
   `-    GPG Public Key: 0x25BFB848   Please GPG sign your mail.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
Url : http://lists.linux-foundation.org/pipermail/fhs-discuss/attachments/20110506/21f1dc24/attachment.pgp 


More information about the fhs-discuss mailing list