$HOME/.Nooooooo!

[Tony Linde]

Hi John,

> 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.

But it is still in the wrong place. If we can get all the apps to put their
files into the appropriate place then we'll avoid problems in the future.
(My $HOME/.workbench directory has 2.5Mb in 15 files and I barely use the
app).

App data goes into $HOME/Application Data/xxx

Temp data goes ??? - anyone?

Saved info goes in $HOME/My Documents/xxx

Since other apps (gaim, mozilla, google, skype, ...) are getting it right,
it should not be too difficult for VObs apps to do so as well. All I'm
asking is that apps be written so as not to mess things up for the users -
regardless of how much info they're writing.

T.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: John Taylor [mailto:jontayler at gmail.com] 
> Sent: 13 February 2007 14:59
> To: Tony Linde
> Cc: apps at ivoa.net
> Subject: Re: $HOME/.Nooooooo!
> 
> 
> 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
> >
> 
>