On 28 Apr 2019 13:00 -0700, from bakul(a)bitblocks.com (Bakul Shah): XDG already does that. At least Norman already mentioned ~/.config in this thread. https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/xdg-user-dirs/ Not sure how common that is on non-Linux systems, but it seems pretty common on modern Linux distributions. My workstation Debian system has a staggering 3467 files in that directory, spread around 444 directories (75 directories directly under ~/.config). Plus another 142 dot-directories and 66 dotfiles in ~/. Now, ~/.config typically uses multiple files per application, and at a glance there's some stuff there that could definitely go, but I still shudder to think of having all of those directly under ~/, so it's clearly doing _some_ good in that regard. And that's to not even begin to talk about all the stuff you'll find in /etc on a modern Linux system. I'm not sure about that; different applications have very different needs, and trying to shoehorn one into another would be ugly; quite possibly even more ugly than just having different formats. Imagine trying to write mail sorting recipies (think procmail) in a file with the same format as that of one holding word processor settings or an image metadata store. I guess that's half-way tolerable on Windows because next to nobody edits the settings directly anyway, but on a system where many such files are sometimes, or often, edited directly by the user, it might well hinder more than it helps. I guess you _could_ go with something like XML or JSON, but that's a bit like saying "all cars should have an engine and a refillable fuel store", in that it doesn't actually standardize anything _meaningful_ (in both of those cases, the magic is in the schema, not the format). Lists of examples not intended to be exhaustive. -- Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael(a)kjorling.se “The most dangerous thought that you can have as a creative person is to think you know what you’re doing.” (Bret Victor)

On Mon, 29 Apr 2019 at 14:15, Michael Kjörling &lt;michael(a)kjorling.se&gt; wrote: That's application-specific, not distribution or OS specific. I have 58 subdirectories of ~/.config on my workstation at work; that's not deviating much from your case; 58 directories (indicating about 58 apps), 2047 subdirectories, 7422 files, 481MB of data, the largest bits being cache data for Google Chrome web browser. I have had little reason to worry about this; I tend to concur. Yeah, the time they tried doing that, we got "XML everywhere," and that wasn't a notable improvement. What you see on mobile devices these days is that the ".config/" file is a SQLite database, which is where both configuration and application data are captured. As someone that spends a great deal of his time writing SQL code, I find that not too heinous; others might disagree. I think having a SQLite file is better than getting some heinous XML file. (Especially if the XML file is some thinly disguised serialization of a hierarchy of COM objects, where modifying element order would be liable to make your Windows application blow up.) The "mobile platforms" have gotten quite a lot of milage out of using SQLite databases (true both on Android and on iOS); there could be worse things. The SQLite web site does have a page somewhat proselytizing this: https://sqlite.org/appfileformat.html I heard D Richard Hipp (author of SQLite, now head of the dev team) explain this at PGCon 5 years ago < https://www.pgcon.org/2014/schedule/events/736.en.html> He also contended that the world might be a better place if LibreOffice documents were captured as SQLite databases rather than being bundles of XML stored in a .zip archive. That's a nice lively argument to have. Actually poke at the slides at PGCon 2014; he makes similar arguments about git repos (what if metadata were in a database?) and ePub book files. If we were going to forcibly shoehorn everything into one thing, I think I'd rather that than a lot of the alternatives. But I'm admittedly excessively comfortable with SQL ;-) I can live with us having a number of data formats, particularly if they remain simple. -- When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"

On Tue, Apr 30, 2019 at 06:44:08AM +0000, Michael Kjörling wrote: So is "Office Open XML"; a sufficiently large campaign fund is indistinguishable from a standards committee. Every Android device, iPhone/iPad, Chrome or Firefox installation, Windows 10 computer or Red Hat Enterprise Linux installation uses SQLite. Also, the Library of Congress considers it as good as XML as a storage format. It is fairly certain that SQLite is wider-adopted than OpenDocument -- or at least wider-deployed. I'd argue that SQLite files and XML documents both suffer from the same problem, in that (during normal use) you have to load the whole thing in order to use it effectively. In other words, they don't play well with pipes. But for a document format, maybe the Unix Nature is less of a concern. khm

On Mon, 29 Apr 2019 18:05:12 -0000 Michael =?utf-8?B?S2rDtnJsaW5n?= &lt;michael(a)kjorling.se&gt; wrote: Michael Kj?rling writes: I meant to suggest that a unix wide convention, with an API to access config data from programs, may still be of some use. This should contain user specific configuration in a few lines. mh for example has a single per user config file: .mh_profile. It allows you to specify your local maildir's path (defaulting to ~/Mail). All mail messages and additional state/data is then stored under ~/Mail or its subdirectories. So something like "path: foo" can be used store application specific stuff that doesn't fit in the minimal config model. The goal would be to cover the majority of programs and provide some guidelines for more complex applications. I suspect most of these files contain some state and cached application data or content as opposed to configuration. Try the following from your home dir: du -a .??*|cat -n|grep -v / |\ awk 'BEGIN{x=1;} {print $1-x, $3; x=$1;}'|sort -nr|head This prints out top 10 of total files/dirs under each top-level dot directory. You can try similar from .config. For me, most in the top 10 are programs I haven't used in years! Not shoehorn in everything but support a core set. By "one place" I meant something like a ~/etc or ~/rc or ~/config directory but not a single file. A separate config file for each program (and library) that needs it. Ideally I'd separate config, state, content and cache. I find <program>/{config,state,<content>,cache} to be more modular than {config,state,<content>,cache}/<program> -- what Apple forces on Macs. Ex: ~/Library/Preferences/org.tug.TexWorks.plist

Von: Jon Forrest &lt;nobozo(a)gmail.com&gt; in theories - yes, in real there are a lot of configuration files all over the place.