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  • Exactly; I’d add that many distributions explicitly forbid packages modifying each others’ configuration files, leaving configuration directories as the only option for multiple packages to contribute configuration “pieces”. Commented Sep 25, 2018 at 13:07
  • First encouters with directories, in place of simple config files left me puzzled how the respective software will treat the contained information. Is there some sort of convention how the directories are treated (i.e. that all its contained files are concatenated in their LANG=C order of occurence)? Commented Sep 25, 2018 at 13:14
  • I guess the most-used convention is that they are (effectively, the program may just read in each file in turn) concatenated in some order that at least respects digits, so you can start file names with digits if order is important. But I haven't seen any "official" policies, though distros may have them. Commented Sep 25, 2018 at 13:23
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    That should be a real question, because some softwares do document the conventions to be followed and answer comments are really not the place for discussing them. Commented Sep 25, 2018 at 13:42
  • they usually start with numbers zero padded to some width (eg. 01-foo.conf, 10-bar.conf) so that the numeric order is the same as the lexicographical order (which is the default order used by globbing, ls, sort, etc). Commented Sep 25, 2018 at 15:05