Re: XDG and Freedesktop

On Tue, 01 Jul 2025 07:02:45 +0100, Nuno Silva wrote:

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

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?

Suppose you wanted to share some files with other users, but not other
files. Tell me how you would group things and set permissions on your
directories to achieve that, starting from $HOME.

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.

One or two files, no big deal. Once we get up to a few hundred, then
that’s clutter.