On Fri, 02 May 2008 00:03:24 -0000 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > On 11:45 pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > >I like this, except one issue: I really don't like the .local > >directory. I don't see any compelling reason why this needs to be > >~/.local/lib/ -- IMO it should just be ~/lib/. There's no need to hide > >it from view, especially since the user is expected to manage this > >explicitly. > > I've previously given a spirited defense of ~/.local on this list ( > http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2008-January/076173.html ) > among other places. > > Briefly, "lib" is not the only directory participating in this > convention; you've also got the full complement of other stuff that > might go into an installation like /usr/local. So, while "lib" might > annoy me a little, "bin etc games include lib lib32 man sbin share src" > is going to get ugly pretty fast, especially if this is what comes up in > Finder or Nautilus or Explorer every time I open a window.
You have a problem with 10 directories? Well, ok - if you have that on top of all the clutter that you normally get, yeah, I might object too. On the other hand, if *every* application used those 10 directories - and *only* those 10 directories - for all the files it needed that weren't for user-created data, that would be heaven. The fallacy you're falling into is that users never have to deal with those dot-files (or directories). They do. One of the most common operations when trying to diagnose a misbehaving application is "delete the configuration files" (my favorite is that I fix gnucash printing failures by deleting CUPS config files....), and the user has to figure out which, if any, of those magic files need to be deleted. If you're using Finder, you wind up turning on the preference that says "show me those", and suddenly your nice, clean directory explodes into ... Well, here's my home directory, shared between a Mac and a Unix box: mbook-fbsd% cd mbook-fbsd% ls | wc -l 42 mbook-fbsd% ls -d .* | wc -l 174 It's not very clean. Because it's a Mac, it's got some directories that the Mac felt I needed that I really have no use for. And there's maybe a dozen files there that are scratch files from various things I haven't cleaned up yet. Of course, the dot-files are much worse, because I normally don't see them, so there's not incentive to clean them up at all. But if i could trade those 172 (can't lose . and ..) "hidden" .files for 10 visible directories in ~, I'd do it in an instant - even if I didn't already have bin, etc, src & lib directories there. > Put another way - it's trivial to make ~/.local/lib show up by > symlinking ~/lib, but you can't make ~/lib disappear, and lots of > software ends up looking at ~. Just for the record, it's equally trivial - but better - to make ".local" disappear by symlinking '.local' to '.'. But providing an option is even cleaner, and then the fact that you can't use symlink to hide one is moot. As far as I'm concerned, .local is the worst possible choice for this choice for this name. Not only does it wind up in the more cluttered of the two name spaces, it doesn't tell me anything about the application(s) it belongs to, so I have to worry about it pretty much every time I'm mucking about with the config files. .python would be much better - at least I'd know what it was for by the name. <mike -- Mike Meyer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.mired.org/consulting.html Independent Network/Unix/Perforce consultant, email for more information. O< ascii ribbon campaign - stop html mail - www.asciiribbon.org _______________________________________________ Python-3000 mailing list Python-3000@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com