NSUserDirectory ... was Re: (no subject)

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 6 Mar 2007, at 11:24, Nicola Pero wrote:

> Yup ... I see what you mean.  I did a quick search on the internet
> and found that NSUserDirectory returns /Network/Users with
> the Network domain mask, /Users with the User domain mask, and
> nothing with the other ones.
>
> Hmmm.
>
> Interpreted in this way, 'NSUserDirectory' is not very useful as a  
> concept,
> because eg in Unix systems users can have their directory anywhere  
> on disk.
> While most "normal" users will have /home/xxx as their home  
> directories, that's
> not necessarily always the case (just think of root).

I agree ... it's not an idea I'd want to base my code on (I guess you  
can use NSHomeDirectoryForUser() in most cases).
Presumably the idea is that you can iterate through the  
subdirectories of these paths to find all the 'normal' user  
directories.  I've never needed to do that.

> Anyway I suppose in our implementation we just let people specify  
> in their
> filesystem layout a 'location of user home directories' (by  
> default, /home),
> store it in all the various config files, and have it returned for  
> the combination
> of NSUserDirectory/LocalDomain ?
>
> Do we need to bother with a different location for the network  
> domain, or
> with a different location for each domain ?

For consistency I guess we should ... presumably it's not much more  
effort to do that.  The whole thing is really for MacOS-X  
compatibility though, so i think we must at least support the user  
and network domains.