[Flightgear-devel] Hidden vs public files

[James T. <zak...@ma...>]

> On 5 Jan 2017, at 21:09, Alan Teeder <ajt...@v-...> wrote:
> 
> 
> C:/Users/alan/Appdata is hidden by default, which behaviour can of course be 
> overridden. This is not novice user friendly.
> .fgfsrc was moved out of fgdata ,but the joystick files were not. Both need 
> to be hand tailored by the user.
> .fgfsrc is a user unfriendly file name for Windows. It is treated as a file 
> that has no file-name, only a file type, making it awkward to manipulate.
> Why do we have C:/Users/alan/Documents/Flightgear/(for Terrasync) and 
> C:/Users/alan/Appdata/Roaming/flightgear.org?
> 
> Is it possible to put all of these in one place for simplicity?  I would 
> prefer C:/Users/alan/Documents/Flightgear/ as it is much more accessible 
> than C:/Users/alan/Appdata/Roaming/flightgear.org/

This has diverged from the original discussion, so I changed the subject line.

Anyway, there is a very important point here: the content of FG_HOME are /not/ supposed to be public or user-editable. That’s precisely why we use a hidden location such as AppData on Windows and ‘Library/Application Support’ on Mac.

Anyone editing the contents of files within FG_HOME is assumed to know what they are doing, and be at least a technical user, if not a developer. A normal user should never know anything about FG_HOME at all, any more than users go looking into the data for Steam, Chrome or any other application’s data inside AppData (or Library on Mac)

The problem of course is that many wiki pages and articles encourage and recommend people to change files inside FG_HOME, which is unfortunate. And recently we had the example of the route-manager saving inside that location as well.

This is also why the default download dir on Windows was moved to $user/Documents/FlightGear, since people complained about large aircraft/scenery downloads filling up ‘hidden space’ (although again Steam does all its downloads to AppData….)

The best fix IMO is to move files which normal users are expected to touch, to public locations such as Documents or the Desktop - for example people have mentioned the log file, we could easily have a checkbox to log to the desktop instead of FG_HOME.

What other files inside FG_HOME are relevant? Alan mentioned joystick configurations, but personally I have never touched one of them inside FG_HOME.

Kind regards,
James