[Usability]The messy world of applications files

["S. Boucher" <stephane boucher videotron ca>]

Ok, I wasn't too sure where to send this.  It kind of relates to
usability.  But at the same time, this is a complain to all app
writers, whether it is for gnome, or whether it is kde, or even any
other type of application.  However, I have to start somewhere, hence
this mailing list.

Let's get to my problem: Applications writers carelessly follow the
good old unix way of putting confings right in the top of the home
directory of a user.  For some applications, there is now a <dot>
directory where all the cruft is dumped in, but that's not cutting it.

This worked ok in the days of unix having only a handful
application.  But nowadays, there's just too much stuff in the top
user directory.  However, that's only a minor annoyance.

Where it gets messy is when I try to reinstall my PC from scratch in
order to have the latest greatest.  There was a time where I could
copy a few things: ~/News, ~/.log(in|out), ~/.cshrc, ~/diary, a few
files in .netscape, ~/.emacs, and maybe a few other things.

That was the good old days.  Now, try to save your precious files and
wipe out the rest.  Not so easy.  I wasn't able with mozilla.  But by
no mean is this unique to mozilla.

Of course, one way is to backup your entire home directory, reinstall,
and restore your home directory in the hope that the new applications
will have no problem reading the old files.  But doing it that way,
the end result maybe a hybrid between the old system and the new
system as far as customisation, menus, and such goes.  I certainly had
that.  I had installed ximian on my old system, and when I got done
installing my new system the menus where of the ximian flavor.

I don't want that.  I want the brand spankin' new system, with my
personal files (contacts, mail archives, news archives, and such).  I
ended up creating a home directory from scratch and tried to salvage
what I could from my old home directory.

There are just too many files for too many applications, and it is
hard to distinguish what each file for each application does if you
are not the application author.

Ideally, all applications should follow a certain amount of structure. e.g.:

    ~/app/data/<app-name>/...
    ~/app/customisation/<ap-name>/...
    ~/app/tmp/<app-name>/...

data: This would be things like list of contacts, mail archives, etc.
Essentially, Information that a user will not tolerate loosing.

customisation: preferences for window manager, etc.  Essentially,
information that a user can lose and not feel an urge to go jump off
of a building.

tmp: things like caches.

Then, the day I decide to reinstall my system, or move to a new one
I'd just need to backup ~/app/data/... along with my other personal
files.

Currently, it is a mess, and there is a simple solution to this
mess...  I would hope that the gnome project would show the way.

Thanks for your attention :-)