move devonfw ide scripts to .devon folder or .devon-ide folder within $HOME

[maybeec]

As a user with technical interest, I want easily distinguish user data generated by my applications on my machine so that I can discover them easily and potentially remove/migrate files on purpose.

The devonfw ide generates the scripts to be added to the system PATH variable in $HOME/scripts, which IMHO is not a good way as the scripts folder is even not identifyable easily to the application it serves to. It would be better to add this scripts folder to $HOME/.devon folder (which I think is generated by devcon?) Or is it even generated by devonfw ide? If the latter, this should be the folder to go for. In any other case, it might be even better to come up with $HOME/.devonfw-ide/scripts or anything like this.

[hohwille]

This only applies to windows that does not have a concept of ALIAS and has other limitations for CMD. All we need to do is have the devon.bat script on the system path so it is always available in CMD. We could even copy it to "%SystemRoot%\system32" or somewhere in "Program Files" like other installers do it. However, we do not want to require administrative permissions to allow "installation" on limited and restricted machines.

In the end I am not very convinced yet, that we should implement the suggested change and deal with the compatibility problems it brings.
So other users might have contradicting requirements and say that if the path already has to be extended then with something reusable like a universal scripts directory where the user can also put other custom scripts.

[maybeec]

We definitively should not make administrative rights as a precondition.

Anyhow, I don't agree to the the contradiction of the requirements. There is no issue at all having a specific path for ide scripts and possibly another user specific scripts folder, where a user has his own custom scripts. The latter would even be named differently by every individual. I see this as two orthogonal requirements.
I think it seems to be your specific setup on your machine, which is rolled out here although it does not make any sense to have a folder where different applications would put in their scripts. In every file system applications try to make sure, that they have sovereignty over their folders.

[hohwille]

If we ever decide to change the configuration folder layout, I would propose a general cleanup:

• rename ~/.devon to ~/.devonfw (or ~/.devonfw-ide)
• rename devon.properties to devonfw.properties
• move ~/devon.properties to ~/.devonfw/devonfw.properties
• move ~/scripts to ~/.devonfw/scripts
• rename devon folder in settings repo to devonfw
• include a feature that detects the "old" layout and automatically migrates to the new one

Still I see more value we can bring with our effots currently.