Comment 25 for bug 1023012

It's broken behavior, and there are all kinds of sample dot-files with settings for Linux/Unis programs around that people now have to fix up and novices will not realize that, esp. as the documentation on the websites for what to do with them won't mention that as they are offering the file with the dot after all.

IMHO this is a bad regression in behavior, and unless there is a huge security problem with saving dotfiles, I don't think it's a solution to anything but some obscure, probably old filesystem for a single platform, like mentioned in comment 0 - an initial dot is a standard thing to have on unix-based OSes, like OS X or Linux.