Why hide the system and config dirs? [LWN.net]

Why hide the system and config dirs?

Posted Apr 9, 2004 11:01 UTC (Fri) by Duncan (guest, #6647)
Parent article: The User-Accessible Filesystem Hierarchy Standard

The part I like best about this is creating a homedir subdir for config
files. However, once you get all those out of the main homedir and into a
single subdir, there's no reason to keep that dir hidden. Make it
~/config rather than ~/.config, and ~/system rather than ~/.system.

In fact, I've done as close to that as I can in my own homedir. Most of
the ~/.<whatever.rc> files in the homedir are simply symlinks to UNHIDDEN
parallels in ~/config/<subsection>/<whatever.rc>, with <subsection> being
something like kde, gtk, console, etc.

Duncan

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Why hide the system and config dirs?

Posted Apr 15, 2004 15:24 UTC (Thu) by jalexstark (subscriber, #5742) [Link]

Absolutely. Linux is beginning to look like MS in this regard. Hidden directories are almost as annoying as hidden file extensions.

My home directory is a mess, and I can't clean it up.

Principles:
* Have one dir for config, one dir for Desktop, one dir for personal software, one dir for volatile (non-backup) stuff.
* Don't hide things as an excuse not to clean up a mess, eg configuration.
* Don't make things so simple for the idiot that lead to unnecessary confusion, eg file extension hiding.
* Make backups easy, eg provide a way of getting the browser cache out of harm's way.

I have solved these so far by creating multiple personal directories such as /home/tmp.joe as well as /home/joe.

I think that a good way forward would be to phase out $HOME and replace with $HOMECONFIG, $HOMECACHE and $HOMEMAIN, or something universally agreeable. It would be trivial for s/w to use these.

[This comment was provided with the support of a battery backup, ;)]

Alex