Recommendation for $HOME

[Thomas Güttler]

Hi,

the file system hierarchy standard defines nothing
about $HOME. 

I think a little standard (recommendation) would be good.

Here are some ideas:

If email is stored under $HOME the path to the
inbox directory should be $HOME/Maildir/Inbox/.
Every MUA and MDA uses a different default location. It would
be good to have a recommendation.

In the Maildir base directory (~/Maildir) all directories which don't
contain a maildir directory must start with a dot. This means all
index files must start with a dot. The index file for "myfolder",
should be beginn with ".myfolder."

Background: I tried some MUAs, and now the maildir base directory
contains a lot of index files. That's annoying if you use e.g. mutt,
which displays all the index files, too.

To avoid too many dot-files and dot-directories under $HOME,
applications can use $HOME/.etc/myapp/.  If ~/.etc/ is used, "myapp"
must be a directory.

The above idea could be done with more directories: ~/.tmp ~/.var ...

In my HOME directory there are 191 dotfiles/dotdirectories. That's too
much.

What do you think?

How to write a recommendation/standard for things like this?

 Thomas

-- 
Thomas Güttler, http://www.tbz-pariv.de/ 
Bernsdorfer Str. 210-212, 09126 Chemnitz, Tel.: 0371/5347-917