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

[Christophe Fergeau]

Hey,

On Wed, May 02, 2012 at 01:49:42PM -0400, William Jon McCann wrote:
> 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.

Ah, I had forgotten about the part of the spec that allows to relocate the
directories through env variables, thanks for the explanation!

Christophe
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