Re: Structure in $HOME

[Andrew Sobala <aes gnome org>]

On Sun, 2003-01-12 at 21:47, Seth Nickell wrote:
> Some folders inside each application could be standardized. For example
> it might be standard to have a "Preferences" folder in every application
> dir. Certainly desktops would internally standardize on certain things,
> like GNOME might require every app to have a particular structure for
> GConf. However, most of the files and folders would be at the
> applications discretion (though its highly encouraged that they try to
> use human readable file names and maintain a nice structure).
> 
> An important point here is that in the case of application data,
> information is rooted not by the type of data but by the application. So
> its not Preferences/Evolution and Share/Evolution, but
> Evolution/Preferences and Evolution/Share. I realize this is less
> convenient for, e.g. gconf, but this is pretty important to making the
> folder human browse-able (and also makes thing like backing or deleting
> a specific application's data *much* easier).
> 

I might want to back up all of my preferences, for backup reasons,
without backing up the whole galeon cache. For this reason, it would be
easier to have a single preferences directory to back up, with
application-specific data in separate directories after that.

So preferences could be stored centrally, and I could additionally back
up evolution (all my emails) but not certain other programs (eg.
galeon). Which isn't so far from what we have at the moment.

I don't agree that it should be unhidden though; I hate the way
evolution stores its data in an unhidden directory. A user shouldn't
need to access program data files 99.999% of the time - backups, that's
pretty much it. Installing fonts and themes should have a reasonable
GUI.

-- 
Andrew Sobala <aes gnome org>