> Just like a UNIX file system ends up filled with .dotfiles garbage I didn't ask about to have around.
Which one is better - a configuration file in some place or default configuration buried inside binary blob?
Which one is better - a configuration file in some place or default configuration buried inside binary blob?
I actually really like the way git does it, where it reads each of these in order, last one wins.
- Default configuration compiled in
- Global configuration
- Per-user configuration
- Per-project configuration
You can opt-in to however much configuration complexity you need. Just cloning the occasional thing? Don't bother configuring, the global defaults are probably good enough. Simple commits and pushes? Make a user-level dotfile in your $XDG_CONFIG_HOME to set some basic info. Complex per-project aliases? If you want that, go ahead and opt in.
Contrast that with programs that just dump their whole default config into my home dir on first run. Just filling up with nonsense, often no way to tell what I changed or didn’t.
TO DO. /s
Also no one edits text files by hand, we use tools for that, tools that manipulate what is anyway a stream of bytes, whose meaning is given by whatever tool is used to manipulate such stream of bytes.