$HOME/.Nooooooo! (fwd)

[Mark Taylor]

Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2007 15:23:34 +0000 (GMT)
From: Mark Taylor <m.b.taylor at bristol.ac.uk>
To: Tony Linde <Tony.Linde at leicester.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: $HOME/.Nooooooo!

On Tue, 13 Feb 2007, 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.
> 
> 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?

Tony and other interested parties,

use/abuse of a user's home directory is not much related to PLASTIC -
as John said, there is a $HOME/.plastic file, but it's only a couple of lines 
long.

For java applications, the normal place to store temporary files
is in the directory given by the system property "java.io.tmpdir" - this is 
typically /tmp on Unix, but may be set when invoking the
JVM (e.g. java -Djava.io.tmpdir=/disk/scratch) if required.

If a java application is writing to a user's home directory
(and Aladin may have had its reasons for doing this) it is very likely
doing so by examining (directly or indirectly) the system property "user.home". 
You could change this behaviour by redefining that system property when java is 
invoked, e.g. "java -Duser.home=/tmp/$USER -jar app.jar".

Non-java applications will mostly have OS-specific approaches to these issues.

Mark

-- 
Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-928-8776 http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/