[PLUG] /home/user partition question

[chris (fool) mccraw]

> On Sun, Jan 18, 2009 at 12:06 PM, Michael M. Moore
> <michael at writemoore.net> wrote:
>>> Can you elaborate on why this is preferable to mounting something like
>>> that in $HOME?
>>
>> I would love to know that too.


i see a few benefits aside from "it's tradition", but they may not be
relevant to your usage patterns:

1) i've run into a problem with relative-paths in mainly mp3
playlists.  works great on linux, works not so great when exported for
use on windows via samba.  i think it makes more sense to make a
static dir like /opt (i choose /spoo/mp3 for this application) that
works the same as a windows path (winamp at least is smart enough to
trade \ for / in paths, if the path is otherwise the same).

2) i often wonder "what is using up all my space in this directory?"
and run du -sk * to find out.  oops, i caught another partition in my
output if it's mounted somewhere unexpected like /home or /home/fool.

3) i am much more likely to type rm -rf ~/a* then i am to type rm -rf
/<anything>.

4) i occasionally share my files or allow other user login to the
fileserver to browse.  it's useful to be able to point people
somewhere outside of my homedir, which has 15 years worth of crap in
it, with which i am quite comfortable, but which makes navigating it
for those who don't share my brain quite difficult.

5) i have two user accounts on most of my machines--one for my typical
barebones setup (yay mouseless computing with ratpoison(1)) and
another that fires up whatever desktop environment the distro ships
with.  they necessarily have different homedirs (same uid, though) so
that they don't share config files.  getting used to ~/asdf in one and
/home/fool/asdf in the other is annoying.

there are workarounds for every one of those things, i know.  but hey,
why bother when i get the benefits for free just by mounting it
somewhere else?