Ticket #4529 (closed defect: wontfix)
Misfeature: "history"
| Reported by: | no | Owned by: | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Priority: | critical | Milestone: | |
| Component: | mc-core | Version: | master |
| Keywords: | Cc: | ||
| Blocked By: | Blocking: | ||
| Branch state: | no branch | Votes for changeset: |
Description
Midnight Commander stores records of user activity in the file ~/.local/share/mc/history, including directories visited and filenames manipulated.
I'm not assuming that anything nefarious is going on, but it's certainly unclear who this file is intended to benefit. I never found a feature of Midnight Commander that allows browsing this "history", and it doesn't appear to be documented. It may be leftover from some uncompleted or abandoned idea. The only references I can find to this file on the web are people trying to find out how to disable it.
Personally I am tired of having to remember to disable and delete it on every user account on every system where I install Midnight Commander. This misfeature is best deleted.
At an ABSOLUTE MINIMUM, it must not be enabled by default.
This history file in its current form, especially being undocumented and of unclear purpose, is useless, untidy, inappropriate, creepy, and may interfere with data protection legal requirements for some use cases.
Change History
comment:3 in reply to: ↑ description Changed 2 months ago by andrew_b
- Status changed from new to closed
- Resolution set to wontfix
- Milestone Future Releases deleted
Replying to no:
Midnight Commander stores records of user activity in the file ~/.local/share/mc/history, including directories visited and filenames manipulated.
Yes.
I'm not assuming that anything nefarious is going on, but it's certainly unclear who this file is intended to benefit. I never found a feature of Midnight Commander that allows browsing this "history",
This file contains histories of all input lines (command line, copy/move, etc).
and it doesn't appear to be documented. It may be leftover from some uncompleted or abandoned idea.
No. That idea is absolutely clean and fully completed.
The only references I can find to this file on the web are people trying to find out how to disable it.
Personally I am tired of having to remember to disable and delete it on every user account on every system where I install Midnight Commander. This misfeature is best deleted.
At an ABSOLUTE MINIMUM, it must not be enabled by default.
No.
This history file in its current form, especially being undocumented and of unclear purpose, is useless, untidy, inappropriate, creepy, and may interfere with data protection legal requirements for some use cases.
If you're so paraniod, you should run MC with separate profile:
To change default root directory of MC, you can use MC_PROFILE_ROOT environment variable. The value of MC_PROFILE_ROOT
must be an absolute path. If MC_PROFILE_ROOT is unset or empty, HOME variable is used. If HOME is unset or empty, MC
directories are get from GLib library.
Don't want to scare you any further, but you do realise that shells like bash & zsh, vim etc. also have a history function enabled by default? So you might have an even bigger problem on your hands.