.gaim Revisited

[Sean Egan]

On 3/21/07, Ethan Blanton <elb at psg.com> wrote:
> First of all, I don't buy this "home directories are too cluttered"
> bit, and second of all, this thing isn't reducing the clutter *at
> all*, it's creating _more_ clutter, and spreading it around all over
> the friggin' place.  Right now, if I want to kill off everything
> Gaim-related, I remove ~/.gaim.  Under this plan, not only do I have
> to find eleventy base directories in which to search for Gaim crap, I
> have to figure out what it's called *inside* those directories.

It seems to me the same argument could be made about the UNIX
filesystem in general. If you want to remove a piece of software, you
have to remove stuff from etc, bin, lib, share, var, etc. This spec
seems to me merely to map this hierarchy to $HOME.

If this spec gets adapted broadly, people won't be confused by the
distribution of all the files. They'll expect it.

If you don't like the behavior, you get to override it by exporting
all the environment variables to $HOME. The configurability allows for
a lot of benefit, I think. If you want all your configuration on your
USB stick, but don't want to fill it up with non-critical cache
files... trivial.

I agree that $HOME being cluttered is a non-problem, but I think this
spec is more about keeping various files an application writes more
obviously organized than it is about solving a "clutter" problem.