[Bf-taskforce25] Proposal: .B.blend -> startup.blend

[Matt Ebb]

Hi,

I noticed the new .b25.blend addition, which got me thinking a bit.

At winter camp, we agreed that we should move to better folder
locations for resource files, especially on OSX. For example, moving
the contents of the .blender folder that's hidden inside the
application bundle to /Users/UserName/Application Data/blender/ where
it's easily accessible, and as the platform standards dictate.

We should apply the same logic to the .B.blend file. For such an
important file, it's terribly inaccessible and difficult to edit. It's
necessary to be able to access this file for various reasons
including:
* For testing/debugging, being able to rename your existing config and
test by making a clean file, and renaming back after testing
* As an artist, packing up your config to take to a new workstation
* Switching between configs for different users on the same workstation

This is currently very difficult:
* On Mac OS X, files beginning with . are hidden by the finder, so
even if they were to by chance look in the non-standard location where
it's kept, most users wouldn't even know it exists.
* On Windows, dot files are visible in Explorer, but difficult to
manage. It's impossible to rename a file to .something.ext, it
requires characters before the first dot.
* Even on many linux systems, dot files are hidden by default in the
file browser.

A good first step would be to just rename the .B.blend file to startup.blend.

Not only would it be vastly easier to work with and manipulate on the
various systems that Blender supports, but it also gives users a much
better indication about the file's purpose. Then, when (as we also
talked about at winter camp [1]) we separate this file out to one
containing startup UI settings, and one containing preferences, we can
give them logical names like startup.blend and preferences.blend

So.. comments? :)

cheers,

Matt


[1] http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BlenderDev/Blender2.5/WinterCamp/EditorReviews