> I think the point is that if an application has to store anything in a > user directory, a dot directory is a consistent one to create and use. > Most applications store data as actual files somewhere on the > filesystem, so the only stuff left to store is configuration data. The > notebook is kind of different in this regard, as it is a web > application (like gmail or facebook) but you run it on your own > computer.
Well, the problem of storing content like notebooks comes up frequently in a lot of GUI applications. Take a look at iMovie, iTunes, iPhoto, Eclipse, f-spot, Audacity, Miro, OpenOffice, and Miro, to name just a few widely used ones: they all put actual data files in user-visible subdirectories of the home directory by default. Users would be very confused if all their Eclipse projects were stored under .eclipse or all their photos were stored under .iphoto. Most of them also have separate configuration files under the dot files. That's the de-facto standard. By putting the Sage notebooks into some obscure subdirectory of .sage/... you're basically telling users to stay the hell away from them. Actually, I think the nicest arrangement would be (this is a slight variation of what I proposed before): -- put Sage notebooks into ~/Sage -- guarantee that I can edit anything in ~/Sage at any time -- put Sage config data into ~/.sage/files -- put Sage output and other cached data into ~/.sage/cache Actually, with that kind of setup, it would also make sense to... -- ~/Sage/lib -- contains library Python files that the user has defined -- ~/Sage/data -- contains all uploaded data files (shared among all worksheets for that user) This addresses another problem, namely that adding library and data files right now is messy: I need to add library files into the Sage installation's site library (which gets blown away when I install a new version of Sage), or I need to somehow arrange for a Sage path to be set. It would be much easier if I simply knew that ~/Sage contains "all my Sage source code and data" that I created (but not the output from computations). The use case where I run Sage from my account and then end with other people's notebooks in my .sage/... directory strikes me as odd. It think it would be better to make a more explicit distinction between single user and multiuser usage. For multiuser usage, there are different scenarios that require different directory paths. Some installations might want to put all storage into /volumes/sagedata/USER/..., others might want to put it into ~USER/Sage. Separately from using Sage for creating collections of notebooks for teaching, we're also trying to let students use Sage on a student cluster and the current setup is not working well. The setup that works best is just to tell every student to start their own copy of Sage, but that means that sharing doesn't work well, and it is more resource intensive. Tom -- To post to this group, send email to sage-support@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-support+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support URL: http://www.sagemath.org
