I believe that the problem has been solved, it has just been poorly implemented in some cases. The general gist that more local configs takes precedence over more global configs is a simple and powerful mechanism which has worked. Yes, distros can be a mess where there are five different config directories but I believe that specific problem is orthogonal to how we solve config precedence.

It is even poorly implemented in such ubiquitous tools as ls. For example if I always want output to be sorted by last modified the _only_ point of configuration is the command line. But I can control colors via either the command line or an environment variable.

I've lost count of the numbers of times I've straced commands to see where they pull configuration from or grepped thru codebases looking for getenv calls. Any unix consensus for configuration is in theory only not practice.

File location is actually pretty germane to precedence. A more "global" configuration cannot be applied if the program is looking for it in the wrong location in the first place. Let's not even discuss the horrible state of where to store local configurations in a users home directory. As long as it starts with a . it's fine :).

I've used Linux exclusively for nearly 20 years - but not because I loved its configuration management story.

ls is a very poor example as it was a program built in v1 Unix over 50 years ago which has remained the same due to backwards compatibility and being standardized in POSIX.

We are arguing over whether the glass is half empty or half full. I can also come up with plenty of examples of poorly designed programs, but I can also bring up examples of programs which are not perfect but much more usable than ls. I’m sure you could have also picked a program which is better designed than ls as well.

Do you have any examples that aren’t confusing and super complicated?

Kind of related but not: if you are interested in cli design I recommend this guide as well: https://clig.dev/

I think people are overly focused on how crappy Unix tools from the previous millennia are (ls, sendmail, dd, etc…) but I do truly believe that cli tools can be ergonomic because I have used and built tools which feel ergonomic.

I think the aws cli is a decent example. It isn’t perfect by any means but it demonstrates how to handle config files, environment variables, and command line arguments in a usable way: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/cli-configu...