On Sat, 23 Oct 2021 19:22:57 -0400
Steve Litt <slitt@???> wrote:

> For a *Personal Computer*, $HOME is a zoo, and I either have to live
> with it, reorganize it only to get broken again with the next major
> upgrade, or violate FHS.

Right from the beginning, I've always thought of $HOME as the place
where my software keeps its stuff. My software, not me.

It got horrifying when I kept installing, trying, and uninstalling
software.. most of which left behind dotfiles and dotdirs that may or
may not remind me of the name of some program. (I hated wondering if
some object was necessary or just clutter)

After several dozen dotfiles appeared, I learned to identify and
migrate items I cared about and reference each with a symlink.

Then after blowing away a distribution and installing something new, I
would rebuild the symlinks pointing to that other partition/drive. The
programs would have a version similar enough to cope with re-using the
dotfiles. This was essential in my experiments with many, many programs
and distributions.

I do recognize that the leading dot can distinguish things from my own
stuff, but it feels like software can stomp around in that tree and I
don't trust it with my data.

Of course since then there are intrusion detection systems and the
like, but that's complexity creeping in. etckeeper would have been
spectacular had it been around back when I was in my youthful
experimentation phase.