knocte :: MonoTema

Every classic Linuxer would know why it's very handy to dedicate a separate partition for the /home folder of your tree: you could in theory share it between multiple OSs that you installed in your box (which you choose to run when you start your computer).

Now, I'm guessing that many people reading and nodding to the above, will also know that sharing /home/ is one thing, sharing $HOME (/home/yourUserName) is a completely different beast.

For example: you have a stable distro installed in your box; you decide to install a new version of that distro along the old one, in the same box. You run the new distro with a new account tied to the old /home/yourUserName folder: KABOOM!!! Weird things start happening. Among these:

• The newer versions of your desktop or desktop programs don't run properly with the settings saved in your .dotDirectories (they are to blame because they didn't probably have a settings-conversion feature).
• The newer versions of your desktop or desktop programs have a buggy settings-conversion feature; because your program does not run properly, or as well as it would have run if it had been ran for the first time with no settings saved at all.
• The newer versions of your non-buggy desktop or desktop programs convert your settings to a new format. Then when you go back and run your old distro again, your old-versioned programs stop working because they see settings in a new format which they don't understand. (This is impossible to fix, or very hard.) It's very important that this scenario works, because the migration to the new version of your distro may not be immediate, it may take you some days to figure everything out, and until that happens, you want to still be able to run the stable version of your desktop and desktop programs
• Etc.

To workaround these problems, I have a strategy: I use a different /home/ sub-directory for each distro installed in my system. For example, for distro X version A.B I use /home/knocteXAB/, for distro Y version C.D I use /home/knocteYCD/. The advantage about this is that you can migrate your settings manually and at your own pace. But then, you may be asking, how to really take advantage of sharing the /home folder when using this technique?

Easy: I keep non-settings data (mainly the non-dotfiles) in a different /home/ folder with no associated account in any of the distros. For example: /home/knocte/ (no version suffix). Then, from each of the suffixed /home/ subfolders, I setup symlinks to this other folder, setting the appropriate permissions. For instance:

• /home/knocteXAB/Music -> /home/knocte/Music
• /home/knocteXAB/Documents -> /home/knocte/Documents
• /home/knocteYCD/Music -> /home/knocte/Music
• /home/knocteYCD/Documents -> /home/knocte/Documents
• Etc.

• Debugger not stopping on breakpoints.
• Builds breaking with obscure error messages.
• Debugger opening file in the IDE which was already open, duplicating two tabs for the same file.
• Etc.

So I had to use a workaround for my workaround: clone all my projects in $HOME instead of /home/knocte/Documents/Code/OpenSource/ (yah, I'm this organized ;) ).

I've been trying to fix these problems for a while, without much time on my hands.

But the last weeks a magical thing happened: I decided to finally sit down and try to fix the last two remaining, and my patches were all accepted and merged last week! (at least all the ones fixing symlink-related problems), woo!!!

So the lessons to learn here are:

• Even the slickest workarounds have problems. Try to fix or report settings-conversion bugs!!
• Don't ever quit trying to fix a problem. Some day you'll have the solution and you will realize it was simpler than you thought.
• realpath is your friend.
• MonoDevelop (master branch) is now less buggy and as amazing as (or more than) ever (</PUBLIC_SERVICE_ANNOUNCEMENT>).

Labels: CSharp, General, Gnome, Mono, Programacion, SoftwareLibre

# posted by knocte @ 2:56 am