Re: GNUstep directory layout

[Martin Brecher]

Hi all, -

>> User Domain: Everything installed by a specific user in his/her own home
>> directory, which actually should be /Local/Users/<user-name> (on a Un*x
>> system is could be a symlink to /home).
>
>Symlink, sure.  But user home directories should not be 
>GNUstep-specific.  I'm not going to move my home directories into 
>/Local/Users, unless /Local is expected to be 100% always on my machine. 
>  Even then, I prefer to have my users closer to my root directory, with 
>less levels of structure above them.  Most GNUstep users don't fully 
>integrate their GNUstep installations with their system (ie. quite a lot 
>install into /usr/GNUstep, or /opt/GNUstep), so only a symlink *from* 
>/home (or /Users) should be considered.  But, now we have multiple ways 
>of referencing the home directory.  One part of the system could 
>reference it one way, another might reference it a different way.  Are 
>you going to go through and change your installed users' home 
>directories in the password file to /Local/Users/username from 
>/home/username?  What if your GNUstep is installed in /opt/GNUstep? 
>Would you then change your users from /home/username to 
>/opt/GNUstep/Local/Users/username?

Why does GNUstep create its on Users folder anyway when being installed
on a running system? I would rather like to see the 
gnustep-make system to figure out which directory is used to have
users' homes in it. Maybe a --home-prefix option would be nice. 

When it comes to the layout of a GNUstep specific system, I personally
would vote for /Users: It's the easiest to cd to; makes it more 
obvious to create seperate backups of the home directories; and is a
better choice when the folder is mounted seperately.  BTW, you 
don't have a user /usr/local/home folder in the Linux FSH as well as
most other unix systems, thus /Local/Users is inconvenient.

When it comes to a networked system it's of course a little bit more
difficult. One could possibly symlink all home folders that are in 
/Local/Users and /Network/Users so that they would appear in /Users/*.
Another elegant option is the use of an automount 
daemon.

Please excuse any given lack of good arguments or clear language :-)

Greetings,
Martin

--
"Allen ist das Denken erlaubt, vielen bleibt es erspart." (Kurt Goetz)