HOME-ETC is an idea to keep configuration files in a subdirectory specified by user, instead of his home directory. The reason was I don't like a rash, and my home directory has started looking like that.

The idea has arised on the occasion of developing PLD Linux/GNU distribution, where it is developed till now. Many applications need to be patched, and the HOME-ETC library is a helper to not write the same thing more than once.

HOME_ETC is a pathname container. It may be obtained in two ways: using the environment variable of the same name, or using a file inside user's home directory. The filename is .home_etc. The second method must be provided because of applications, which cannot touch user's environment (MTAs, identd, and other daemons). However, in PLD we're setting things up by invoking /etc/profile.d/home-etc.?sh scripts, which are setting the correct environment variable according to information found in the file (see sources for details).

You can find more detailed description in the related manual pages.

ftp://ftp.pld-linux.org/people/siefca/distfiles/

Pawel Wilk <siefca /a/ gnu.org> There was also a lot of other people, who have contributed to this code and/or helped with patching applications. See the AUTHORS and the CONTRIBUTORS files.