Re: Storing file references in GConf

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Mon, Sep 08, 2003 at 07:53:04PM -0400, Ettore wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> as Havoc pointed out before, storing absolute filenames (e.g.
> /home/ettore/foo/bar.txt) in GConf is evil.  If you do that, your
> settings become dependant on the physical location of your home
> directory, which causes trouble if you are mounting your home from
> different machines, or if you are trying to migrate a bunch of
> data/settings from one machine to another.  So, the right thing is to
> store only a home-relative path instead (foo/bar.txt).

$HOME is a useful symbolic path, but there are likely to be others.
The first that comes to mind is <prefix>.  It production settings
where new versions are rolled out in parallel to the old ones its
common to have multiple installs.  This would also bite people
dealing with different distros sharing a home dir (SuSE vs RH).