Warning, I’m about to get on my mild OCD soapbox again. Too many development tools expect to get the privilege of a config file in the root directory of my projects. Many of them don’t even allow it to be a hidden file—they just require a fully unhidden “tool.yml” file sitting right there in the root of your project. Stop it. Please. Linux HOME Directory Link to heading Once upon a time this was a serious problem for organizing files in the Linux HOME directory too. Tools thought way too much of themselves and added files, directories, etc. to your HOME folder. A lot of them still do!
  • esa@discuss.tchncs.de
    4·
    2 days ago

    We could probably stand to have some organisation standards in repo roots, but I tend to agree that dotfiles aren’t the way to go there. The project root is similar to ~/.config and the like: When you’re there you should not be subjected to further hidden levels. Those config files are a significant part of the project.

    State files however, like all the stuff in .git, lockfiles and the like are generally¹ fine to hide away. Those are side effects of running other tools, not ordinary editable configuration. Same goes for cache—and both cache and runtime files should likely go in the ordinary XDG dirs rather than be something every project has to set up a gitignore for.

    If anything I’m more frustrated with the C projects that just plop every source file in the root directory.

    ¹ Just don’t make it too easy to sneak unexpected crap in there. We don’t need to make the next Jia Tan’s job easier.