Config files don't apply to only human users either, though. Automation also uses configs. And they've got to be somewhere. Some automation is desktop oriented, I'll acknowledge.

If this standard came from Posix, sure, that applies generally across unix and linux to all programs great and small. If it comes from Linux Standards Base, I've got issues, cause I don't run Linux, but that at least clearly applies to all programs on Linux, packaged by a distribution and configuration file locations are obviously within the scope of LSB.

But XDG is more or less the Xorg/Freedesktop peeps; how are config files for everything under the sun in their scope? There's lots of stuff in their scope, but this just seems out of the blue. Being not an exclusively Linux organization is somewhat helpful, but still. How is the XDG an authority on where to place config files when there was already a servicable location to put them (and the specification documentation doesn't even have a discussion of who they are, why their spec matters, how the values came to be, etc)

I addressed this in the article: Linux devs not being able to accept some authority—in this case, XDG—is the source of the fragmentation in Linux and why even though we have a spec, there's still a solid 30%+ of programs that don't follow it.

Yes, OpenSSH isn't a 'desktop' program, but there are dozens of desktop programs which use it as a backend. Forget Linux, for a moment: it creates `.ssh`on Windows. Windows doesn't have dot-files, and it never had. This is arrogance.

But I'm not seeing how that's a problem. One of the beautiful things about the Bazaar is that if you don't like one part of it, you can move to another where they do things a bit differently. If everyone is deferring to an authority, upon what virtues and rigors do we determine its validity? What powers does it have, and why should we just blindly follow others in one of the most creative human endeavors available on Earth?

Why should one accept authority? Where does the power of this authority come from?

I have similar ideas in society fwiw. I don't see a moral reason to defer to someone else. Is my will less important than the preferences of some other person or group? As long as it's my time and effort being put into making software, it'll be built to the specification of me and any legitimate stakeholders.

My opinions are probably a result of how and where I was raised.

That being said, I don't claim we should defer to authority for authority's sake. Authority is given by the people. In the case of the XDG Base Directories, for instance, I believe the specification is well-laid-out. It has gained enough traction and enough developers adhere to it that it has authority of its own accord: by accepting the specification, developers have voted to give XDG that authority.

That is how it works in democracies, no?

The concept of authority as democracy doesn't really make sense to me. Does that mean you adopt any and all conventions once they hit 50.1%? I think we as humans can do better than just follow or limit ourselves to standards that may be popular, but are not necessarily the best tool for the job. I struggle to find many popular and mainstream software practices to be quality, or fitting for me despite the one-size-fits-all that such popular things try to aim for.

What is your role in this 'democracy', if you are actively lobbying for a minority (the XDG) to seize control over the way desktop software is written in the community, by way of writing the piece and it getting shared? That strikes me as manipulating a narrative to get people to "vote for" XDG. It's not a legitimate vote if you and others are actively evangelizing. It's called social pressure and canvassing.

Such social and organizational efforts are completely oblivious to the fact that they are operating in a bazaar, and their methods are designed better for Cathedrals. Cathedrals are used to tightly integrated stacks and top-down decision-making, so standards are hardly different than marching orders to the monks.

The bazaar is the wild west. The only authority in a bazaar is whoever owns the land. In a digital space, there is no land. So how does any authority -- controlling environment variables, of all things -- intend to exert itself in force?

If it's truly a democracy, then the voice of those who resist XDG is equally valuable and valid.

165 packages support XDG; 164 partially support it, where partial support really just means they have a way to configure the config path to an arbitrary file and if you tell it with an environment variable, it works; and 128 are unsupported. [1]

Based on that, if software is a democracy, the vote for XDG has failed, let's move back to dotfiles. Of course, moving config files is a lot of extra work and cost for users, so all the existing applications should get a pass for wherever their config files already are, but new application should follow the democratically elected choice of stuff dotfiles in the home directory.

Of course, I don't believe software is a democracy in the sense of voting and the will of the majority overriding the minority. Software is a democracy in the sense that the tools are open, so anyone can build what they want. Less restrictive source licenses allow you to take other people's work and build upon it how you want. Someone could fork all of the programs they use that don't follow the convention of their choice and "fix" them, and users could pick which one they like, software distributors could choose which one they'd like to distribute; etc.

From earlier:

> I addressed this in the article: Linux devs not being able to accept some authority—in this case, XDG—is the source of the fragmentation in Linux and why even though we have a spec, there's still a solid 30%+ of programs that don't follow it.

All authorities naturally have a scope. We don't all follow the style guides of the New York Times or the Chicago Manual of Style, although those are common to adopt in the United States because writing a style guide is hard and might as well pick one someone else did the work for. On the other hand, if you tell a UK person that they didn't follow a US style guide so they're arrogant, they'll quite rightly tell you you're arrogant and the standards of another country don't matter.

Sure, if you're writing new software, you should look around for the relevant specifications and consider picking one. If you're existing software, switching specifications is a breaking change, and you should consider what you get. You've said you find the XDG Base Directory Specification well-laid-out; but I find it lacking a declaration of objectives, justifications, and scope; those issues are non-starters for me, so I would chose the dotfile specification instead, unless I was writing something under the scope of the XDG.

[1] votes counted by separating out the tables, and grep -c '<tr>'; this is a poor way to run an election, but it's the data I have available, and the amount of effort I'm willing to expend

I would say this is rather consistency accross OS.

Every openssh user knows where to find its config regardless of the OS, if it follows XDG, windows guidelines or if it is running on Haiku, SerenityOS, Redox or RiscOS.

There are plenty of windows specific ssh clients that follow Microsoft guidelines.