I just *had* to comment.

[dsr at tao.merseine.nu (dsr at tao.merseine.nu)]

On Wed, Jun 02, 2004 at 10:42:47AM -0400, Derek Atkins wrote:
> ~/.* is not sufficient to deal with "global settings".

No, it's clearly per-user.

The obvious extension is /etc/dotfiles/* (or the name of your
choice) with the same syntax and access methods, and using
filesystem permissions to make most things read-only to the
common user.

> However a
> registry isn't sufficient, either.  Think distributed systems (i.e.,
> I've got 1000 machines and the software is installed on a central file
> server (not on each machine) and run out of the network file system).

In which case you use rsync on /etc/dotfiles from the
appropriate central repository branch (webservers get theirs
from repository/webservers/etc/dotfiles, login machines from
repository/logins/etc/dotfiles, etc.).

> Registries of all forms fall flat in the face of distributed file
> systems, unless there is some standard way to read the global registry
> info out of the file system.
> 
> So, I guess ~/.* would work if you could set the application to read
> its global configuration at install-time.

That's a requirement, yes.

-dsr-