F8devel - user configuration storage locations

[David Timms]

Steven Bakker wrote:
> On Thu, 14 Jun 2007 11:03:20 -0400 Tony Nelson wrote:
> 
>>>>  cp -a ~/.*
>>> Not simple. If you do that you'll try to copy over the parent tree due to
>>> '..' (that is satisfy your code) represents parent and '.' represents
>>> current folder.
>> Not simple, but how about:
>>
>>     cp -a ~/.[!.]* .
> 
> chsh -s /bin/zsh
> cp -a ~/.*
> 
> ;-)
All those howto' are nice, but perhaps miss the point. Let's say I am a 
new linux user. Many apps I start store their config somewhere. Where ?

Why make the configs files hidden at all ? Are there secrets in them ? 
Isn't this os/platform/distro built on openness ? If this user wanted to 
remove the settings and get back to the original default config by 
erasing a config for a certain app {say they mis-configured something} 
where would they imagine to find them ? Should they add a new user and 
start their settings all over again ?

http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/latest/ and related other 
standards on http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/ do provide 
some guidance for programmers. But do the storage locations actually 
make sense to non-programmers ? The first of the two links is definitely 
a difficult read.

ps: I'll throw in that having a user "home" directory that isn't 
actually called "home" is another weird thing that is cause for 
confusion. I'd be one of those people who have "home" and "work" things 
on my computer, stored in folders named that. And then we have the 
users' home directory which is actually called "home"; that could 
perhaps be called "homes" or "homedirs", both would be less confusing.
The current situation is that I go to my "home" directory within my user 
"home" directory called david, itself located within "/home".

DaveT.