I’m relatively new to linux but wanted to try out awesome and make it look a bit better. I did sudo dnf install / sudo yum install kitty picom (not sure which of them should I default to, I mostly just dnf install stuff) and both installed but their default config files (one in /usr/share/doc and other in xdg i believe) are nowhere to be found. Any idea on how to install them with config files ?
You can find sample config file for picom at /usr/share/doc/picom/picom.sample.conf and for kitty:
I’ve found this already, I’ve also found default config for picom. My question was “why despite every guide/tutorial saying default config is installed with those applications it is not when installed with fedora ? and why or how to make sure whenever I install another application it won’t happen again.”
User configuration files must always be set up by users explicitly. Some applications may set up template files when they are run for the first time, but this is not something all applications do.
From a Fedora perspective, rpm, and so dnf, does not touch the user directories at all. It only touches system directories. So if there are system wide config files provided with software to be installed in /etc/, installing the software will put them there. But, it will not create any files in the user home directories.
Can you point us to these posts you’ve found please? It’s possible that when they say “install”, they mean “copied to your system” which is what “installing” a package in Fedora does too, but it does not mean “copied to your home directory to be used as a config file”.
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https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Picom
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/kitty
Those are the first that come to mind. I know they’re arch wiki, but same goes for multiple youtube videos with different distros. I know that my home/user won’t be affected by reading/watching that on all of them I need to copy them from their /usr/share folders which cointain base/template/backup. It did work as I’ve seen everywhere for awesomewm. I could link some yt videos from my history but alot of them are not really useful though a lot of them they did mention to copy the base from /usr/share/docs/kitty or /usr/share/xdg/picom. For the reference I did install compon before that which seemed to have missing conf as well. Given all of that I’m wondering whether there’s something wrong with my install of fedora as googling missing default conf files with linux/fedora/kitty/picom presented no results. I’ve only used fedora with some web development applications for few months and that worked flawlessy. I’m running fedora 36 workstation.
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So there’s nothing wrong with your install. The Fedora maintainers for these packages just seem to have decided to not put a default system wide configuration in /etc/.
As a package maintainer, I would do the same because for a freshly installed package, I want the user to get the unconfigured, “vanilla” setup, instead of an already configured setup.
I had a quick look at the picom spec in Fedora:
https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/picom/blob/rawhide/f/picom.spec
Note that the maintainer has not removed the system-wide file. The upstream build system does not install it in /etc/. So, this seems to be something that Arch does, not something that the picom maintainers do. So I’m not surprised that the Fedora maintainer hasn’t gone ahead and installed the config file in /etc/ either.
The same for kitty—the maintainer has installed the files required for shell integration, which aren’t really user-configuration files, but the upstream build system does not seem to install a system-wide config in /etc/ here either.
https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/kitty/blob/rawhide/f/kitty.spec
So, I guess, Arch has a packaging guideline where they install a default config system wide for users, but we don’t tend to do this in Fedora. We add the available example or template file as documentation, which can be easily found using rpm -qd <package name>.
I don’t see anything specific about not shipping system-wide default config files in the Fedora packaging guidelines, though. Indeed, system-wide applications (like dnf) will ship these, so it’s something that’s addressed case by case. This is all I can find:
" If the package requires some manual configuration or there are other important instructions to the user, refer the user to the documentation in the package. Add a README.Fedora , or similar, if you feel this is necessary. Also, please make sure that there are no lines in the description longer than 80 characters."
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