[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: Standardizing ~/.cache/ and similar things.



Marco d'Itri wrote:

On Sep 19, Alastair McKinstry <alastair.mckinstry@ildana.net> wrote:

Unlike Marco, I do see a lot of value in reorganising at least _some_ of
the 'configuration' files of users: seperating out .mozilla web caches
and .evolution IMAP caches greatly relieves the size of  backups of ~/
directories. If all caches were in one directory it would make it
What about http://www.brynosaurus.com/cachedir/spec.html ?
tar supports it.

Interesting, but very specific to the caching example. There are other useful parts of the proposal, too: e.g. if libraries are in ~/lib then its easy to have $LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/lib work on multiple applications; also
for an installer to install an application into a users directory. For this
reason I prefer $HOME/var , $HOME/lib, etc. to .lib, .cache, .bin, etc.


possible to fit a slimmed /home on a single .iso to archive / backup,
for example, whereas now it takes 2 DVDs due to IMAP and web caches,
etc.
It's not like it's an Herculean task to add a couple of directories to
the exclude list of your backup program...
This is the wrong way round, IMHO: rather than having to examine every
new application I use to see what config files and caches it creates
(and never be sure of that: what files in .evolution can I safely remove as
caches, and what ones are essential config? is it safe to remove / not backup $HOME/.evolution/IMAP/* ? ), and add them to my backup
program excludes list, I can just add /home/var/cache/* to my excludes
list and change applications to use it.  No need to keep a list of
cache directories up-to-date.

Regards
Alastair



Reply to: