[libvirt] [PATCH] Use XDG Base Directories instead of storing in home

[William Jon McCann]

Hi,

On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 6:26 AM, Christophe Fergeau <cfergeau at redhat.com> wrote:
> Hey,
>
> On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 02:55:06PM -0400, William Jon McCann wrote:
>> This has a number of advantages for us:
>>
>>     It allows sharing a home directory between different machines, or
>> sessions (eg. using NFS)
>>     Supports performing smart or selective migration of settings
>> between different OS versions
>
> It's not obvious to me how the XDG spec helps there, could you enlighten
> me?

There are a variety of answers to this and it depends on what the
specific use cases are. Apparently tons of people in the field are
having these problems. I hear complaints about it all the time when I
talk directly to enterprise admins. I also had problems with it myself
when I was in that field.

We just started a wiki page with some tips on this
https://live.gnome.org/GDM/CustomUserDirectories

For the shared home directory case, an admin has a number of options.
She can set up different XDG directories per machine, have the
directory names include machine or seat id (for multi-seat), store
them in a look aside out of the home directory, have read only copies,
instantiate the directories per login, etc. Lots of options, Windows
for example has had the ability to do some of this stuff for a long
time.

Migrations and updates are much easier because we or an admin can
choose to retain user data always, selectively migrate settings, reset
settings, purge caches, and/or ignore or remove runtime information.

Really none of that was possible before. This isn't the end of the
story but it is a first step.

Hope that helps,
Jon