GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 121778
Using ~ (tilde) in file names is slightly unfortunate
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
The package gnome-themes, 2.2, which comes with Red Hat beta Severn includes four files ending in ~ (tilde). According to https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=102079 this is intentional, contrary to my first assumption. I would like to suggest some more explicit suffix is used for this. Many GNU programs, emacs notably, generates backup files using tilde as a suffix. It is not uncommon for sites to have global cron scripts which clean away such backup files after some time. Such scripts would then remove these index.html~ files too, which is obviously unfortunate. /usr/share/themes/HighContrastLargePrint/index.theme~ /usr/share/themes/HighContrastLargePrintInverse/index.theme~ /usr/share/themes/LowContrast/index.theme~ /usr/share/themes/LowContrastLargePrint/index.theme~
You're right, this is a pretty ugly hack at best and wasn't really very well thought through :/ Will try to get this fixed for 2.4.1, even if it's only by choosing a better filename for the 'installed but not used' files.
Indeed, an easy fix like changing the name to something like index.html.disabled would make things much more clear. And at the same time avoid problems like the one I mentioned.
Installation now renames disabled themes to index.theme.disabled, and removes any index.theme~ files that previous installations may have created. Probably still need to revisit this whole crazy idea but it closes out this bug for now :)