modetc: Move your dotfiles from kernel space

19 points by eBPF 16 hours ago on lobsters | 7 comments

This reminds me of https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~marriaga/software/libtrash/ which I used for a while.

Forty-Bot | 6 hours ago

why not symlink?

chinmay | 5 hours ago

why do people keep replying with "just symlink lol" whenever this topic comes up? the problem is still there because the top level of your home dir still has garbage

CobaltCause | 5 hours ago

Because symlinks don't solve the problem: they have to exist on-disk in the application's expected location, and the point of this kind of tool is to force files to live in proper locations instead of strewn about at the whims of noncompliant applications.

Forty-Bot | 2 hours ago

OK, but now you're maintaining some file on disk instead that has a list of all the remappings. I don't see a difference, except that one is the discoverable solution that works on anything unix-y, and the other is a globally-implemented hack in the kernel that no standard tools work with.

And personally I don't mind the mess. The files are hidden for a reason :)

sigmonsez | 5 hours ago

I second this. Its likely a joke rewriting paths as a kernel module. The ux is also terrible.

Cloudef | 3 hours ago

Looks neat. Doing this on kernel module level makes sense. I'd carefully analyze the source though. String handling in C is very error prone and on quick glance i dont see the module checking return value of snprintfs for example. I would've prob written this in zig which has properly bound checked slices.