$HOME/.Nooooooo!

[Tony Linde]

I'll raise this again as a separate topic.

We're getting problems with (plastic) apps using .Xxxx directories to 
store temporary files.

Doing a demo the other day on a (WinXP) machine configured by the 
department (and so not changeable) we kept getting 'profile storage 
space exceeded' messages from the OS. This because all the apps were 
using $HOME/.xxx directories as scratch space: this area in Windows is 
for user profile information not general storage. We need some way that 
users can point to some other 'home' directory for AR/PLASTIC apps.

The main offender was Aladin because it stored a couple of VOTable files 
in the $HOME/.aladin directory.

Can I ask that anyone writing an application which might be run under 
windows *not* store anything in the $HOME/.xxx type of directory. 
Temporary files should go in the Temp directory and application profiles 
in a $HOME/Application Data/xxx directory.

I see that gaim, firefox, thunderbird etc all do this correctly - can 
someone look up how they handle it and place the advice up here?

And apologies if any of this is duff information - feel free to correct 
the above if I am wrong.

Cheers,
Tony.

-- 
Tony Linde
Phone:  +44 (0)116 223 1292    Mobile: +44 (0)785 298 8840
Fax:    +44 (0)116 252 3311    Email:  Tony.Linde at leicester.ac.uk
Post:   Department of Physics & Astronomy,
         University of Leicester
         Leicester, UK   LE1 7RH
Web:    http://www.star.le.ac.uk/~ael

Project Manager, EuroVO VOTech   http://eurovotech.org
Programme Manager, AstroGrid     http://www.astrogrid.org