Re: XDG and Freedesktop

On 2025-07-01, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Tue, 01 Jul 2025 00:07:03 +0100, Nuno Silva wrote:
>

You did miss the point that the spec does this in a way that
specifically does not allow to retain the previous behaviour. Why?

>
To get rid of the clutter.
>

This, intentionally or not, deals a blow to choice.

>
Think of it this way: keeping all those dotfiles in the root of $HOME is
not just clutter, it’s also a potential privacy risk. It lets other users
on the system see the kinds of apps you run, and perhaps even when you
last ran them.

That's not really a valid argument, is it?

Sounds to me that you need to check the permissions and umask in use in
your system?

It would literally take just a dot per file to retain that
compatibility.

>
Putting files beginning with “.” inside directories beginning with “.” is
kind of ... stupid, don’t you think? The initial “.” is supposed to denote
“don’t normally show this file/dir”. It was a hack to reduce clutter.

At this point, I'm starting to suspect you're trying to justify a bad
and non-inclusive design decision as you go.

It's all fun to argue about "." in front of names being a hack, but
that's a very tiny cost that'd have given you the ability to coexist
with the existing approach.

--
Nuno Silva