Fwd: Convention Over Configuration: A Way Forward?

[Kevin Krammer]

On Sunday, 2012-01-08, you wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 6, 2012 at 8:53 AM, Kevin Krammer <kevin.krammer at gmx.at> wrote:
> > How would that improve upon any of the holdback reasons you cited above?
> > 
> > Is there any public statement of developers in the groups "indifferent"
> > or "uncertain" that they would support a fixed location but cannot be
> > bothered to read a single environment variable?
> 
> Yea, the simple fact that they don't do it.

I am afraid I don't get that. What does "it" refer to?
Making a public statement? I am not sure not making a public statement in 
favor of something can be counted as an implicit public statement in favor of 
something.

> It might seem trivial, but
> to programmers every additional adjunct is another maintenance issue.
> With XDG base directory standard it means eiterh rolling my own code
> or having dependency on an external library.

Hmm. I haven't done any application with just low level APIs but reading an 
environment variable and a string comparison seems indeed rather trivial to 
me. Though I can only speak for languages I've used so far, e.g.C/C++, Java, 
Python. Might be more complicated elsewhere.

> By using a fixed path,
> the code need not have to worry about any of that. Thus making it much
> easier to implement and support.

Ok, based on the assumption that reading an environment variable could be 
difficult the question is why don't these application developer just hardcode 
$HOME/.config?

That would always keep $HOME clean of "hidden" config files and additional go 
along XDG using applications in a majority of setup without any drawback.

> > How would the proposed inconfigurability make the location more widely
> > known?
> 
> By gaining acceptance into FHS proper. FHS would have no problem
> accepting fixed locations. Indeed, at this time the standard
> explicitly designates the use of home dot files.

Interesting thought.

> And I disagree with the term "inconfigurability". It's would still be
> configurable, but via the file system itself, not the environment
> variables.

True, though I find symlinks to be more tedious to switch and temporarily 
override.

Anyway, I guess my main puzzlement is still whether developers currently not 
hardcoding $HOME/.config are not doing it because there could be systems where 
XDG_CONFIG_HOME points to something else.

Cheers,
Kevin
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