[Kde-kiosk] global edit of kmenu

[Stephen Brown]

On Mon, 12 Jan 2004, Mike Ely wrote:

> <rant>Seems like the configurations for KDE (not just the kmenu -
> reading the kiosk API shows a minimum of 3 locations for each
> application's configuration) are scattered to the four winds.  If this
> were a relational database, it would not be normalized.  I appreciate
> the fact that it isn't, but doesn't it seem fair to sysadmins that
> there should be one solid location that they can rely upon to change a
> kde config?</rant>

This is partly because the distribution creators, and you, as well, are
free to put things anywhere you desire.  RedHat only recently started
including the /opt directory in a clean install.  Others have used it
extensively for a number of years.  If you want to get *NIX sysadmins
started arguing, what goes in the various parts of the filesystem is
almost as contentious as which editor is best.

On my RedHat systems, the globals are in /usr/share/config/* -- why not
/usr/share/kde/config/* or /etc/kderc  ???  Only the developers/
distromeisters know for sure.

Once upon a time, there was an effort to standardize the locations (the
FHS -- Filesystem Heirarchy Standard) but each developer comes from a
different background, so what makes sense to one is looney to another.
Take a drastic schizm like Windows developers used to putting all pieces
of their software into c:\programname trying to port their code to *NIX
where the configs go in /etc and the binaries go in either /bin or
/usr/local/bin, and the documentation goes somewhere else entirely --
/opt was "created" for those developers to use in the fashion of all
pieces going in /opt/programname like in Windowsland.  BSD folks
disagree with the ATT folks about where all the pieces go, too.

Steve Brown
sbrown7 at umbc.edu