Ok, I'm half asking this to see if anyone knows of a group/project like it, and half to see if anybody else agrees with me.

Have you taken a look in your /etc directory recently or done an "ls -al ~"? Am I the only one that looks at that mess of configuration files and thinks that there has to be a better way of organizing this stuff?

I'm not meaning to single out Bash or anything (it just always sticks out in my mind), but why oh why is the global configuration named "profile"? And why isn't it tucked neatly away in another directory (and I'll push the bounds of reason here and suggest something off-the-wall like /etc/bash)? Yes, yes, I know Unix has a long history and Linux was created to be a PC-based version of Unix, but it's been many, many years since then. I'm surprised there hasn't been some sort of initiative to clean up and reorganize this. Some software does put their configuration in a separate subdirectory of /etc (and I love them for it), but not nearly enough of them.

So, does anyone know of any projects that have this as part of their focus? It's bugging me enough that I'm considering modifying the source code to implement it. I know I may be setting myself up for a headache (some apps hard-coding paths), but eventually I could find them all

I just hope that I won't be 90 by that time.

A little obsessive compulsive huh?

More subdirectories in /etc? That just makes it even more confusing and hard to find to me. Personally I don't think /etc is that cluttered or messy. Most of the files are pretty straight forward in what they do, etc. But as far as I know, I haven't seen any groups or the such with a goal to change what has been sort of a standard for many many years, probably cause they don't care and are sticking with what everyone is use to.

Do what I do, clean out the /etc by removing the config's you don't even use and such.

Obsessive compulsive? me? Surely not... Ok, well, maybe a little... Come to think of it...

Actually, I was thinking about creating an entirely new file organization. Having a logical organization for things is the root of that obsessive compulsive behavior (I blame my parents). Anyways, I would personally love to see a file organization such that all binaries/executables, config files, and documentation are wholly contained within a subdirectory of their own (such as /bin/bash-2.05b). Personal configuration files are simply like-named hidden directories in the user's home dir. Though, problems with things such as PATH prevent this. Unless you make symbolic links in /bin to the binaries in each subdir, which really clutters things up, or change how the PATH environment variable works such that subdirectories are searched as well. That would be a nightmare if, say, you included the current directory in your path.

Oh well, I was thinking of doing things one step at a time. I'll be making another LFS system soon, and figured I might try to reorganize /etc. If I don't destroy the system entirely, then I might consider toying with the idea of modifying the way executables are handled. That, however, will require a level of obsessive compulsion I have yet to encounter