$HOME/.Nooooooo!

[John Taylor]

On 13 Feb 2007, at 14:45, Tony Linde wrote:

> I'll raise this again as a separate topic.
>
> We're getting problems with (plastic) apps using .Xxxx directories  
> to store temporary files.

Hi Tony.  The PLASTIC hub writes a single file $HOME/.plastic which  
is half a dozen lines long.   The large files you're describing have  
nothing to do with PLASTIC.

>
> 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
>