I wholeheartedly agree with this blog post. I believe someone on here yesterday was asking about config file locations and setting them manually. This is in the same vein. I can’t tell you how many times a command line method for discovering the location of a config file would have saved me 30 minutes of googling.

  • jonne@infosec.pub
    15·
    2 years ago

    I guess the difficulty here is that sometimes that decision is made by the package manager, not the developer. You’ll see Debian distros using a different location compared to a red hat one, while Mac OS is again different, so it might be hard for a developer to tell you where it is.

    Still, some kind of universal CLI flag that tells you where the binary/service looks for configuration would be a great idea.

    • jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de
      17·
      2 years ago

      For Linux distros everything should use XDG_CONFIG_HOME and distros should start refusing to package anything that doesn’t.

    • Rexelpitlum@discuss.tchncs.de
      8·
      2 years ago

      And also: where it found the config file it is actually using at the moment. This would cover the 90% of the cases in which you just want to change a single Key to a different value or something or so…