Comments on: Home folder organisation

By: Tortanick

Tortanick — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 20:41:22 +0000

*sigh* not my day, third time’s the charm

mv /old location/mozilla /new location/mozilla
rm $HOME/.catalogues/current/mozilla
ln -s /new location/mozilla $HOME/.catalogues/current/mozilla

By: Tortanick

Tortanick — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 19:21:35 +0000

Looks like the last 3 lines didn’t come out well because I used “greater than” and “less than” symbols, so here they are again without them.

rm /old location/mozilla /new location/mozilla
rm $HOME/.catalogues/current/mozilla
ln -s /old location/mozilla $HOME/.catalogues/current/mozilla

By: Tortanick

Tortanick — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 19:19:33 +0000

I love this idea, my vote is for $HOME/.library/appname/{cache|config|…}

but I would prefer that it is $HOME/.library/appname/{var|etc|…}

I would however suggest a slight modification to this scheme, rather than having $HOME/.library you have $HOME/.catalogues/{current|distroA|distroB} current is a symlink to distroX, during bootup a linux installation will change every $HOME/.catalogues/current to point to the correct catalogue for that installation, for example you may have $HOME/.catalogues/{current|debian|suse|gentoo|debiandevelopment}

The reason being that if every app looks in $HOME/.catalogues/current/appname then it becomes very easy to manage where the diffrent files go, some may be on a NFS partition (e.g. shareing you’re thunderbird profile and E-mails with other computers), others in $HOME/.libary (shareing between multiple distros) and more in /var/libary/username (not shared between multiple distros)

I invision a synaptic like tool that lists all you’re installed programs, for each one you can chose any libary (just a list of folders the user chose to use as libaries). If you change the libary for a perticular program (say mozilla) it will:

mv //mozilla //mozilla
rm $HOME/.catalogues/current/mozilla
ln -s //mozilla $HOME/.catalogues/current/mozilla

By: Kelly Clowers

Kelly Clowers — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 07:23:31 +0000

I think this is a great idea. I have tried to setup something like this with a ~/var directory and symlinks from the original cache locations into ~/var, but it is a pain to do manually.

I think if everything was in ~/.cache, it would be easy to clean it all at once and easy to see if all the space in your home dir is being used up by programs and documents or just cache files.

By: dom

dom — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 00:31:33 +0000

.library/appname makes wiping out/restoring all application config/data super easy which I like. The location of the cache is six one way, a half dozen the other. Having all application data together is very nice so I would vote for ~/.library//{config|data|cache}

By: aigarius

aigarius — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 18:03:50 +0000

> Why don’t you introduce an API that apps can use to find out the right directory instead of ‘hard-coding’ this?
I do not want to introduce anything that would force any significant change to *all* applications, as this would. The less changes are needed in *every* program in the world, the higher chances are of this coming to reality.
That is one of the biggest concerns that I have with this - I can decide anything, but it will be useless if it just lies there for years, like that freedesktop.org specification.

By: Olaf van der Spek

Olaf van der Spek — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 17:14:41 +0000

> Is there something better in $HOME/.cache/appname vs. $HOME/.library/appname/cache ? Any other trade-offs that I have forgot?

Why don’t you introduce an API that apps can use to find out the right directory instead of ‘hard-coding’ this?

By: aigarius

aigarius — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 13:43:18 +0000

My plan of action entails replacing that freedesktop.org spec with whatever we decide here and then simply reference that in Debian Policy and the FHS.

By: Stoffe

Stoffe — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 12:55:19 +0000

Please please either make this compliant with the freedesktop spec or work to change that spec - we don’t need more fragmentation anywhere. This doesn’t mean you have to use their suggested directories, but the env vars should be properly set and working, so freedesktop compliant apps “just work”. I’ve already seen a number of them among the younger ones.

Otherwise, I applaud this effort, it’s *so* needed. Installing apps locally is a nice extra benefit, but order in the chaos is essential.

Having a (regenerating) ~/.cache directory would make it easy for end-users to “rm ~/.cache” easily in a number of ways, which could be useful and is also an easily copy-pasted tip.

By: harrytuttle

harrytuttle — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 12:25:51 +0000

it may be interesting to look at how autopackage handles this.