Pet Peeve - begging request of new coin developers to change name of wallet file

[TheDirtybird]

Would some of you "coin developers", which i throw this term out loosely, please please please take the time to rename the wallet.dat file to something different for each coin.. I am so sick of every single coin having the same wallet name.. I mean if I found a wallet.dat file right now I would have no idea what coin it was for.. how long would it take me to figure this out?  So could some of you please rename the friggin wallet file to something relevant to the coin it is attached too.

Thank you and good luck to all!

[markm]

If you found it in the whatevercoin data directory you'd know it was for whatevercoin.

If you found it anywhere else whatever would cause you to imagine it was really a wallet.dat at all, and not some random trojan trying to keep you from deleting it by naming itself wallet.dat?

If you found a file in your backups directory named bitcoin-wallet-30-Jul-2013.bak on the other hand, you might guess it is a backup of a bitcoin wallet.dat, possibly made on or about 30 July 2013, maybe even by you yourself...

-MarkM-

[TheDirtybird]

I realize all this but I think you are missing the point.

[markm]

it is a standard app/protocol really, in practice.

Many many many coins / networks use the bitcoin protocol, and having a wallet.dat is part of the protocol.

Renaming it would just confuse everything, like when people change "directory" to "folder" all over the place in documentation as if changing the name changes the fact it is a directory.

It is crazy having to use totally different names all over the place for the same things, it makes for massive data arrays or lists instead of nice tidy loops and wildcards and regex's.

Even not being able to do things like "for datadir in $HOME/.*coin ; do" due to datadirs named things like .tenebrix instead of .tenecoin is a pain.

If you cannot, even having gone through all that crap to actually enumerate all the datadirs, rely on block files named as blockfiles, wallet.dat files named wallet.dat and so it gets to be a total nightmare.

-MarkM-

[ToxicDartFrog]

I realize all this but I think you are missing the point.

You have a completely legit point. I'd say it's nice to confuse a hacker from figuring out which wallet it is, but at the same time it's likely in a directory with the coin name anyway lol. For that reason alone, renaming for example the LTC wallet to ltcwallet.dat would make it real easy to copy+paste/upload somewhere without becoming confused later if it's sitting in a folder with other wallets.

Again, it's a legit point and you may be a lazy dev if you're trying to argue that there's no use in it

Now I know for most of you copy+paste devs this may be really really hard, but you may want to try giving the option to switch between different wallet files and allowing us to name them differently. Then you could jump between wallets in the UI without having to close, rename the new wallet wallet.dat, put in the directory and reload the program.

[ToxicDartFrog]

it is a standard app/protocol really, in practice.

Many many many coins / networks use the bitcoin protocol, and having a wallet.dat is part of the protocol.

Renaming it would just confuse everything, like when peole change "directory" to "folder" all over the place in documentation as if changing the the name changes the fact it is a directory.

iI is crazy having to use totally different names all over the place for the same things, it makes for massive data arrays or lists instead of nice tidy loops and wildcards and regex's.

Even not being able to do things like "for datadir in $HOME/.*coin ; do" due to datadirs named things like .tenebrix instead of .tenecoin is a pain.

If you cannot, even having gone through all that crap to actually enumerate all the datadirs, rely on block files named as blockfiles, wallet.dat files named wallet.dat and so it gets to be a total nightmare.

-MarkM-

What? You're telling me it's harder to make your coin's wallet.dat mycoinwallet.dat than just doing a find/replace wallet.dat->mycoinwallet.dat in the source code??

[TheDirtybird]

So you are saying my pet peeve will remain regardless of how much more sense it would make to have different wallet names for different coins? 

Maybe I am barking up the wrong tree but I sure would like some kind of unique identifiers.

Is there a way that one can view a wallet.dat file and figure out what coin it is for?  Anyone?

Or how about an option in the client to let us name our wallet whatever we want?

How about changing the wallet to look like no other for once.. most of my wallets look identical and i can't tell which one is open unless i look at the symbol or the the title bar.

Maybe it's not supposed to be user friendly and I have to drive the same old car for ever (analogy)...

These are just pet peeves that annoy me as a miner/trader of many coins.  (regardless I am totally having a hoot with this crypto-game so far) 

[markm]

Maybe you are confusing user-interface GUI things with actual program internals such as filenames.

Maybe there could be a use in having two words, directory and folder: have different meanings for them; and similarly two words, file and whatever the fuck a file gets called when you maybe don't even want to confuse the user by using the same word such as file or document or data or database or whatever for two documents or files or whatever that have different actual uses in use.

Then we could have our wallet.dat, or maybe Currently_Active_Wallet.symlink or whatever, we use inside programs to talk about whatever file it is that currently is the actual in use wallet, while to users in the GUI we could avoid even mentioning that wallets are actually files, files containing data used in such a way that loosely referring to files used in that way as wallets might convey something to the user about what that file is actually used for.

This kind of crap is why GUIs should be totally separate from actual programs that actually do things.

The GUI should collect mousemoves and icon-clicks and so on until a coherent actual command can be parsed from those actions, then pass the actual command to an actual program that will act on the command...

Users can then call anything anything, heck they probably should be allowed to nickname and alias and theme the GUI to death to make it look like it is about any damn thing they want to disguise it as, but out the back it still sends the same standard calls/commands...

-MarkM-

[markm]

it is a standard app/protocol really, in practice.

Many many many coins / networks use the bitcoin protocol, and having a wallet.dat is part of the protocol.

Renaming it would just confuse everything, like when peole change "directory" to "folder" all over the place in documentation as if changing the the name changes the fact it is a directory.

iI is crazy having to use totally different names all over the place for the same things, it makes for massive data arrays or lists instead of nice tidy loops and wildcards and regex's.

Even not being able to do things like "for datadir in $HOME/.*coin ; do" due to datadirs named things like .tenebrix instead of .tenecoin is a pain.

If you cannot, even having gone through all that crap to actually enumerate all the datadirs, rely on block files named as blockfiles, wallet.dat files named wallet.dat and so it gets to be a total nightmare.

-MarkM-

What? You're telling me it's harder to make your coin's wallet.dat mycoinwallet.dat than just doing a find/replace wallet.dat->mycoinwallet.dat in the source code??

No I am talking about things like

Code:

for wallet.dat in $HOME/.*/wallet.dat ; do

since we cannot use

Code:

for datadir in $HOME/.*coin; do

due to people already renamed the $HOME/.${coinnick}coin datadirs to names that don't even end in coin.

Maybe extensions should be used, like ~/.bitcoin.cryptocoin-datadir, ~/.namecoin.cryptocoin-datadir or something.

-MarkM-

[markm]

So you are saying my pet peeve will remain regardless of how much more sense it would make to have different wallet names for different coins?  

Maybe I am barking up the wrong tree but I sure would like some kind of unique identifiers.

Is there a way that one can view a wallet.dat file and figure out what coin it is for?  Anyone?

Or how about an option in the client to let us name our wallet whatever we want?

How about changing the wallet to look like no other for once.. most of my wallets look identical and i can't tell which one is open unless i look at the symbol or the the title bar.

Maybe it's not supposed to be user friendly and I have to drive the same old car for ever (analogy)...

These are just pet peeves that annoy me as a miner/trader of many coins.  (regardless I am totally having a hoot with this crypto-game so far)  

You probably ought not even be able to see inside the datadir "folder". The word "folder" should be scratched out and the word "wallet" written in in crayon uh i mean in GUI, and an icon that looks like a wallet instead of like a folder be used to graphically show it, and when you right-click it its rightclick menu should be mapped to the app that handles that type of folder or that specific app-specific folder, so that when you pick "make a backup" from that menu it knows which things inside there need to be backed up and which are boilerplate such as blockfiles that it can grab off the net as they should be the same for everyone...

Letting you look inside is clearly confusing you and causing trouble so lets just hide the internals behind more icons and crayoned-in new names for things.

-MarkM-

[TheDirtybird]

So in your 'geek speek' you are saying its just too much trouble to be different and stand aside from others for ease of differentiation.  I am not a full time programmer but have had some experience in the past.. and all i hear is "why should we change what works".. its called innovation.. moving forward.. making wallets and gui's that suit the user not the programmer.  Maybe you been coding too long to forget what it's like to be an end user.

[Hydroponica]

Would some of you "coin developers", which i throw this term out loosely, please please please take the time to rename the wallet.dat file to something different for each coin.. I am so sick of every single coin having the same wallet name.. I mean if I found a wallet.dat file right now I would have no idea what coin it was for.. how long would it take me to figure this out?  So could some of you please rename the friggin wallet file to something relevant to the coin it is attached too.

Thank you and good luck to all!

Well, since you asked so nicely, go fuck yourself

[TheDirtybird]

Well such an educated response.  Thanks for showing us who you really are.

[digitalindustry]

I agree with both points .

This comes back to  the user developer divide , and this is an important point .

The wallet.dat all being called the same file is incorrect if  the intention into have the end user use a essentially beta / experimental piece of software .

The wallet.dat is correct as it is if  this software is still in open source development , and there is another essentially linking peice of code that is needed to bridge the Developer User divide .

Both are very important , obviously if you are a developer and you don't listen to investors you may as well start investing your time into making a cool little program that notifys you each day that " you fucked it all up"

However there could be an argument that as this is open source development in progress then , if you choose to use the  Qt design then learn how to back up folders .

But the topic is useful and correct in that there is an end user issue there .

In a " multi wallet"  something that I see as a scenario in the future there would be use to have individual named wallet.dat as when one switched between currencies there would be less chance of a bug or error , but I foresee that being a computer generated code name .



In other words  the user shouldn't be accessing the wallet.dat  and the fact that they have to means the  software is flawed .

[Hydroponica]

Well such an educated response.  Thanks for showing us who you really are.

Everyone already knows who I am. For someone with such contempt for "coin devs", you seem to have a shit ton of wallets, for this to be a concern for you...Pro tip, when backing up your wallet, right click, create new folder, and name it the name of the coin...*mind blown*

[markm]

I agree with both points .

This comes back to  the user developer divide , and this is an important point .

The wallet.dat all being called the same file is incorrect if  the intention into have the end user use a essentially beta / experimental piece of software .

The wallet.dat is correct as it is if  this software is still in open source development , and there is another essentially linking peice of code that is needed to bridge the Developer User divide .

Both are very important , obviously if you are a developer and you don't listen to investors you may as well start investing your time into making a cool little program that notifys you each day that " you fucked it all up"

However there could be an argument that as this is open source development in progress then , if you choose to use the  Qt design then learn how to back up folders .

But the topic is useful and correct in that there is an end user issue there .

In a " multi wallet"  something that I see as a scenario in the future there would be use to have individual named wallet.dat as when one switched between currencies there would be less chance of a bug or error , but I foresee that being a computer generated code name .



In other words  the user shouldn't be accessing the wallet.dat  and the fact that they have to means the  software is flawed .

Exactly, yes. The user should not be seeing any of that stuff, think more like how a website is done, the user never sees inside, even having them see extensions on the page names like .php or .shtml or whatever is extraneous code-leak. Going back even farther actually even just making the users learn geeky crap like dot com, dot net, dot org was a very very hard sell, what they actually wanted was more like AOL keywords or even the google search engine input widget, having to even have heard of "http://" was and maybe still is totally insane geekspeak leak, that is why browsers rapidly defaulted to appending dot com on the end and assuming http if not specifically told to use some other protocol such as gopher or ftp or mailto or bitcoin or any other prefix any user or group of users might choose to teach their browsers to fire up some cool user-side handler for.

Ignorance is desperately desired on the user end, heck now we have computers reading and writing should soon be as out-dated and useless and obscure as knapping flint to make stone age implements, users should just cry and say "baby want, mommy get!" and their needs automatically be taken care of... sigh, being in this primitive pre-holodeck age is such a trying life, isn't it?

Ultimately though maybe either users learn to teach their computers, meaning in effect users become programmers, or computers end up having to teach their users, hopefully eventually teach them to teach their computers...

Hey we are back full circle to open source: "if you want it programmed properly program it yourself!"

-MarkM-

[digitalindustry]

I can't fully agree with you Mark because of course you see it mostly from a developer point of view , and the world is not made up of primarily software developers , but I see where you come from .

Where you misunderstand is that part that so many misunderstand , the economics , and sociological aspects , you are not designing a peice of software that shows a web page or teaches you how to not talk or talk or write , or a game , it's peer to peer cryptocurrency .

The currency aspect means there has to be this bridge between , I don't underestimate that there will be a move by users towards more technical aspects , as there naturally will / has been , but again it's important to stress that having a user friendly useful logical peice of software is not stupid , and dose not mean the end user is stupid , I'd call that successful .

Whereas now it's not fully .

If other professions viewed the world in the same way :


" Want a house ? Build your own ! "

" want a vechical , there has been plenty already made , get working !"

[markm]

Its a currency, so you should also add "Want a house? Pay!", "Want a vehicle, buy one!"

Or in local geek patios, "how much bounty you offering?"

-MarkM-

[yager]

Well such an educated response.  Thanks for showing us who you really are.

Everyone already knows who I am. For someone with such contempt for "coin devs", you seem to have a shit ton of wallets, for this to be a concern for you...Pro tip, when backing up your wallet, right click, create new folder, and name it the name of the coin...*mind blown*

I dont think the end user wants to have to do that anymore. They want it done already for them. If you could right click--New folder, and have the new folder already named for them they would be happy.

[stevenh512]

To everyone accusing markm of "seeing things from a developer point of view" as if he's somehow ignoring end-user needs, this:

No I am talking about things like

Code:

for wallet.dat in $HOME/.*/wallet.dat ; do

since we cannot use

Code:

for datadir in $HOME/.*coin; do

due to people already renamed the $HOME/.${coinnick}coin datadirs to names that don't even end in coin.

To me, that looks like one line of a script to perform automated wallet backups (although I'm sure there are other operations you could perform on your wallets.. like dumping them all with pywallet). Do you really think it would be better for end-users if every coin developer used an arbitrary name for their wallet.dat file, making this kind of automated backups imposible? If anything, developers should be coming up with ways to make backing up a wallet easier for the end-user (not that it's really all that complicated), rather than changing the name of the file "because they can" and in the process killing people's automated backup systems.