<story><title>Ask HN: What are the technical justifications for keeping .DS_Store?</title><text>I was hoping that with macos 11 we would see the deprecation of .DS_Store. I&amp;#x27;m not running the beta so perhaps it is, but what has surprised me is its sustained longevity. What are the technical reasons for keeping .DS_Store? It is essentially a application-specific (i.e. Mac Finder) solution that pollutes the data store.&lt;p&gt;Off the top of my head I can think of a number of other solutions to store directory metadata: a Finder-specific database mapping values to directory paths, resource forks (ala OS 9), etc.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>DiabloD3</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m going to be honest: it should be deleted when seen, and OSX should have never begun this.&lt;p&gt;99% of the reason it exists is because the OS generated thumbnails. I see these in, for example, zips, that do &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; have images in them, and have that file.&lt;p&gt;You know what I&amp;#x27;ve seen? People do `git add &lt;i&gt;` and then I find that directory in the repo. Why does git not automatically ignore that?! It&amp;#x27;s never the right option.&lt;p&gt;&lt;/i&gt;Anything* that pollutes directories should be absolutely verboten, its never what the user wants.&lt;p&gt;Edit: The worst part is, it makes them on network shares, and on filesystems that aren&amp;#x27;t HFS. The hell, Apple?!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>saagarjha</author><text>&amp;gt; 99% of the reason it exists is because the OS generated thumbnails. I see these in, for example, zips, that do not have images in them, and have that file.&lt;p&gt;QuickLook thumbnails actually go in a different cache as they are dynamically generated. .DS_Store files contain things like folder layout information.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: What are the technical justifications for keeping .DS_Store?</title><text>I was hoping that with macos 11 we would see the deprecation of .DS_Store. I&amp;#x27;m not running the beta so perhaps it is, but what has surprised me is its sustained longevity. What are the technical reasons for keeping .DS_Store? It is essentially a application-specific (i.e. Mac Finder) solution that pollutes the data store.&lt;p&gt;Off the top of my head I can think of a number of other solutions to store directory metadata: a Finder-specific database mapping values to directory paths, resource forks (ala OS 9), etc.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>DiabloD3</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m going to be honest: it should be deleted when seen, and OSX should have never begun this.&lt;p&gt;99% of the reason it exists is because the OS generated thumbnails. I see these in, for example, zips, that do &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; have images in them, and have that file.&lt;p&gt;You know what I&amp;#x27;ve seen? People do `git add &lt;i&gt;` and then I find that directory in the repo. Why does git not automatically ignore that?! It&amp;#x27;s never the right option.&lt;p&gt;&lt;/i&gt;Anything* that pollutes directories should be absolutely verboten, its never what the user wants.&lt;p&gt;Edit: The worst part is, it makes them on network shares, and on filesystems that aren&amp;#x27;t HFS. The hell, Apple?!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bacon_waffle</author><text>git can be configured to ignore .DS_Store by default - in your home directory, make a .gitignore file using the usual format, then do &amp;quot;git config --global core.excludesfile ~&amp;#x2F;.gitignore&amp;quot;.</text></comment>