Almost nobody reads the general product. It is better to ask this in a
mailinglist (see http://mail.gnome.org) and point to this bug.

Note that nautilus and the file open thingy hide the dot files by default. If
the dotfiles bother you, disable that option again. Furthermore, an accidental
rm -rf can do wonders to clean up your dotfiles.

Sure, I know Nautilus hides them...  that's evidence that there's a problem. :)
The fact that there is even a perceived need for files "hidden" in ls indicates
an organizational problem.

I don't expect dot files to go away any time soon, but if GNOME & KDE make the
switch sometime soon, then maybe several versions from now other software will
go the same way.

As Olav said, no one reads the general product (just bugsquad members like us),
so you need to either file bugs again individual products or else bring this up
on one of the mailing lists (such as desktop-devel-list).  You could leave this
open if you want to do the former and mark all those bugs as blocking this one
so that this bug can serve as a tracker.  Otherwise, this bug should be closed...

Let us know which route you'd like to take.

Which other bugs should be added?  I looked through general and didn't see other
related bugs that should be blocked by this.

I can handle it either way...  and, actually, if other bugs should be blocked by
this I'll do that, and then make a comment on desktop-devel, too.  (I didn't
want to pollute desktop-devel with this request, since I think it's pretty low
priority.  I didn't realize only bugsquad members watch general, though.)

I'm not aware of any other current bugs that should be added.  I was saying that
you would need to file a bug against each and every product that stores
configuration information in a dot file in the home directory, and then add all
those new bug reports as dependencies of this one.  Personally, I think emailing
desktop-devel would be a lot less work.  (Regardless of the method you choose,
however, I have a feeling that most developers won't see this as being a big
enough advantage to warrant the effort).

I guess that somewhat defeats the purpose of having a "general" bug category.

If every wishlist item/proposed improvement has to block _every other category_,
noone will propose such improvements here.  And, anything posted to the list
will just be forgotten.

But, that's probably the way to go if noone reads this.

Yeah, I agree that the "general" bug category is confusing.  It'd be nice to
have a name that distinguished it a little better but it really is used as an
"umbrella bug tracker" category -- see bug 116236 and bug 144877 for instance.

Also, this bug doesn't have to block every other category; it would just block
certain bugs filed against some of the other products (namely those products
that store configuration files/directories under the home directory).

Sorry to discourage you.  For what it's worth I'd really like this feature too
(the explosion in the number of dotfiles has bugged me many times).  I'm just
not sure we could convince others.

*shrug*

I was a little worried that might be the case when I posted it here, but
I couldn't think of a better category.

I sent a message to desktop-devel...  if people want to make the switch, we can
reopen this as the tracker.

(It's not a critical thing, so I'm not very discouraged...  it's just that it
seemed like an appealing cleanup to me, so I felt it was important to record the
idea.  That's satisfied now, even if it's a closed bug. :)

I am second about this point of view. Lot's of files in my home directory look
very ugly. 

But I think, this problem can be solved in distribution level. For example, if
RedHat decided to patch all it's packages they can do such move. Of course, this
would require some standarts, like freedesktop and other.