<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> <title></title> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> Patryk Zawadzki wrote: <blockquote cite="mid:89b6ba3a0901150657u21f3bc23s62293c2410533e0a@mail.gmail.com" type="cite"> <pre wrap="">On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 3:53 PM, David Faure <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:dfaure@trolltech.com"><dfaure@trolltech.com></a> wrote: </pre> <blockquote type="cite"> <pre wrap="">I think we agree, but we both sent ambiguous enough emails to misunderstand each other :-) </pre> </blockquote> <pre wrap=""> You are of course 100% right. I misread the quotes in earlier emails and thought you were one to imply window size is not config :) </pre> </blockquote> Thanks for the replies everyone. I'll tell you where I'm coming from: I'm having my $XDG_CONFIG_HOME under version control. The goal of this is to have all my "I want app foo to behave exactly like this" settings managed carefully. However, many applications store/update information irrelevant to me (last window size/position, last 10 opened items, etc) in there (often in the very same files), which causes those config files to be no longer in sync and require a commit (with changes I don't care about) or a revert (ugly, because it's very hard to programmatically know if it's safe to revert or not, there could be other chances in the file who *are* relevant), and you can't ignore a particular section or a specific xml element of a config file with any VCS, afaik. I see your points and they make sense.  I think the real issue is no longer "is it configuration or not", but rather "is it configuration that the user cares about or not" Maybe we can keep everyone happy if we make the spec specify more then one config file per app inside $XDG_CONFIG_{HOME,DIRS} One such config file would contain all settings explicitly configured by the user (or application on behalf of the user), while the other config file would store the configs that the application wants to store on it's own behalf. This ways user can manage/ignore with more granularity.  At the very least, this would cause a bit better overview (vs all settings regardless of their nature in 1 file). You could even take it a step further and specify naming conventions for some known types of configuration (eg: $XDG_CONFIG_DIR/myapp/{windowinfo,lastviewed,...}.  Just thinking out loud here. Thanks, Dieter. </body> </html>