Re: XDG and Freedesktop (was: Re: Program to dole out jpg's to subdirctories, card-dealing style.)

In comp.os.linux.misc, Lawrence D'Oliveiro  <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Mon, 30 Jun 2025 05:18:06 -0000 (UTC), Eli the Bearded wrote:

Unix ... has dot files.

Way too many of them. How many are there in your $HOME?
 
The XDG spec aims to keep this clutter under control.

Does it? Or does it just create a new closet to sweep them into?

$ ls -a $HOME |grep -c '^[.]'
72
$ find ~/.config -type f |wc
    305     327   21490
$

Bunch of big "if"s there.

Most of the Linux distros around already contain those libraries. The
whole freedesktop.org group has widespread support among *nixes. They're
not some "fringe" group as you might think.

Yeah, but I run plenty of programs that don't use those libraries and
are unlikely to do so. Is ksh ever going to use ~/.config/profile ? (Is
bash?) xfig is a tool I still use and like, but it most certainly is not
using a file dialog from this century.

Not all the world is Linux, and tools like xfig predate Linux.

Also XDG has a very limited understanding of how people may organize
files. I don't have a "templates" directory, I'm not even sure what I'd
put in one. I don't have a "music" directory, and I don't need one.

Here are the directories I want to use to organize things:

  $HOME/src # my own programs
  $HOME/packages # tar balls and the like
  $HOME/builds # build root for packages
  $HOME/notes # personal text files, including email
  $HOME/bin # where my programs live
  $HOME/lib # where my libraries live
  $HOME/man # where my man pages live
  $HOME/images # photos and no-photos
  $HOME/tmp # temporary storage, eg downloads
  $HOME/video # video files

No capital letters in names. I co-opt some of the XDG settings to use
these, but that's working around the library instead of with it. (Eg. I
use $HOME/tmp for "templates" simply because of similar letters.)

If you run a Linux GUI, then you already have them.

I know that the files on on the disk, I dispute that I use them. At
any one time I'm usually running just the following windowed programs:

    xterm (x many times)
    Firefox
    Deluge
    icewm components

On a temporary basis, I start, run, and quit programs like feh, xpdf,
mplayer, gimp, xfig, vuescan. I don't think I have used any others on
Linux in the last two months. Icons and menus are not a significant part
of how I use icewm. Even the firefox process I've been using for the
last week or two right now was started from a command line in an xterm.

Elijah
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prefers the login on console and start X manually model of Unix