Home directories.

[Thomas Leonard]

On Tue, Oct 26, 2004 at 06:29:13PM +0200, oliver wrote:
> Thomas Leonard wrote:
[...]
> >Config files that follow the basedir spec don't go directly in /etc (which
> >is mainly for system configuration), but in /etc/xdg. So, it would be
> >~/.xdg. However, that's a really bad name for users even if it was only
> >used for freedesktop.org specs.
> Why is it a really bad name? Anyhow, I'd then recommend ~/.etc/xdg/ or
> ~/.etc/xdg-config/

As a user looking for a configuration file, neither .etc nor .xdg would
seem very obvious candidates to me. OTOH, '.config' is easy to remember.

Whatever the sysadmin needs to know to do global configuration, we should
make sure the normal-user side is as easy as possible.

> >Like XFCE, ROX is beginning to store configuration here too
> >(using, eg, ~/.config/rox.sourceforge.net/... to avoid conflicts).
> >
> where they should then use ~/.etc/config/rox.sourceforget.net/... for
> instance.

The question is what else would go in ~/.etc. Eg, ~/.etc/fstab doesn't
seem to make much sense. My model is:

/etc/fstab		- system config file

/etc/xdg/openoffice	- defaults for user config (for all users)
~/.config/openoffice	- user config (one user)

(if I was making a Linux distro, I'd probably set XDG_CONFIG_DIRS to
/etc/config for consistency)

Having ~/.etc has the problem that for any file in /etc, you don't know
whether it supports the system or not, whereas anything in /etc/xdg can
be overridden in ~/.config, or moved by setting XDG_CONFIG_DIRS.


-- 
Dr Thomas Leonard		http://rox.sourceforge.net
tal at ecs.soton.ac.uk	        tal197 at users.sourceforge.net
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