Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "Dotfiles Are Everywhere. We've Lost Control Of Our Home Directories!" video.

  1. Also note that an important part of the XDG spec is the ability to override all these paths with environment variables. And do so individually. This gives you fine-grained control. The only reservation I have is why the default directory for systemwide configs is /etc/xdg, instead of /etc.
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  2. 0:46 How to list only the hidden ones, excluding the useless “.” and “..” entries: ls -ld ~/.[!.]* bash also accepts the “^” character in place of “!”, but “!” is POSIX-compliant.
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  3. 10:05 Or worse still, both config and cache mixed together!
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  4. 0:40 On my main machine, running Debian Unstable: ldo@theon:~> dpkg-query -l | grep -c ^ii 6846 Yup, that’s 6846 packages currently installed.
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  5.  @DistroTube  No, I just like to try lots of things. ;)
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  6. 3:36 Actually, there is a way to get some kind of control over most of them, and that is to redefine your $HOME environment variable to point somewhere else.
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  7.  @jjbailey01  But /etc is the standard place to put all systemwide configs.
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  8.  @jjbailey01  The directories are for files which belong together, e.g. in the same package or related packages. Same with ~/.config for user configs. That’s why I don’t understand why there is a need for this additional /etc/xdg directory.
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  9.  @jjbailey01  Do you know what a “strawman” is? That’s when you try to refute something that I didn’t even say.
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  10.  @jjbailey01  “Extrapolating” from something I said to something I didn’t say. Yup, that’s a strawman, all right.
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  11.  @jjbailey01  How does placing that single file in /etc/xdg instead of /etc help?
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  12.  @jjbailey01  So I put a single file in /etc/xdg. Why is that more “forward compatible” than putting it in /etc?
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  13.  @jjbailey01  Says someone who is avoiding answering my question.
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  14.  @jjbailey01  So you create a config directory /etc/«dir». How is that less “future-proof” than /etc/xdg/«dir»?
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  15.  @nicolasvillafan  You mean, for something that doesn’t obey the XDG spec? If it doesn”t obey the spec, it won’t pay any attention to those environment variables.
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  16.  @nicolasvillafan  You could try changing the definition of the HOME environment variable.
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  17. 1:07 The command ls -d ~/.[!.]* | wc -l reports that I currently have 220 of these.
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