What's the perfect (OS independent) way of storing filepaths ?

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Tue, 21 Oct 2008 11:32:14 +0200, Laszlo Nagy wrote:

> Users who like to go inside "Documents and Settings\Application data"
> and delete things without knowing what they do deserve to have a
> malfunctioning system for sure.

The worst consequence from deleting a settings file should be to revert 
to factory defaults (which, admittedly, may mean the software can't do 
anything useful until you configure it). It should NEVER be malfunction 
or data loss.

Of course, that's in principle. In practice, most software is 
insufficiently defensive to work that way. In the Real World, deleting 
settings files can have any consequence from nothing at all to serious 
meltdown.

But as a matter of principle, users should be able to delete settings 
files and lose nothing more than, well, settings. That's why it's a 
SETTINGS file, not a DATA file. Settings should be information that can 
be easily regenerated if lost. Anything that can't easily be regenerated, 
like address books and bookmarks, are documents, not settings. Any 
program which hides such documents in a hidden settings directory where 
users can't easily make backup copies is a badly behaved program.


> BTW it would be nice to have a standard 'Application data" like
> directory under UNIX. It is true that all kinds of programs will create
> .app files in your home dir which is not very polite.

Agreed, except I hope that when it eventually happens, the name won't 
have a space in it, and it especially won't include the word "My" (as in 
"My Settings", "My Preferences", or "My Application Data").


-- 
Steven