Will We Get An Equivalent To The Standard Linux "shift+Delete"

[Pleng]

You want an SD card to be your "home", you put a "/home" directory on that SD card which is then automatically unioned regardless of which slot it's put in. Remove the SD card, and either writes to home fail, or it falls back on the NAND.

This is fine, you're giving the user a choice, not altering default behavior as mindlord is suggesting we do.

It still means that stuff can fail, or operate differently if you don't have your home SD card in, but it simply highlights the need to make as few programs write to NAND as possible

Yes. This much is true.

 

[mindlord]

And if I take out my SD card which has HOME on it so I can watch a film from another SD card, what happens? I loose all my configs and over rides? HOME gets mounted to the new SD card? And any changes I make in the mean time get applied to my new card?

It's just a bad idea to have this behavior as default. It's going to confuse users.

Not quite, I suggested asking the user if they want to make a newly inserted SD card their HOME, and never asking again. That is unless the user deletes the 0 byte flag file.

I *want* developers to worry about writing to home. I don't WANT developers using HOME unless absolutely necessary. I expect my app's data to be kept in appdata, so I know where it is.

Granted there are some apps which are writing to HOME at the moment, quick dirty ports. Ideally I'd like to see uploads to the appstore only being approved when they've proven to NOT write to the home directory. Any thing you get from elsewhere is at your own risk, but appstore apps should be guaranteed HOME-friendly.

Clearly this isn't happening at the moment and I guess the team don't have the resources to implement it either.

The crux of the matter is, some applications will work great with /pandora/appdata, and that's awesome, good for them. The PND system does go a great distance to alleviate the pressure applied by applications on the NAND, but it can't address all of them, nor can it stop the biggest culprit... the operating system itself.

There are going to be situations where writing to /home/[username] is unavoidable, and that's why I am a strong supporter of working out an officially supported method of putting /home/[username] on the first SD card, with a non-destructive fallback to the NAND when either no card or a card flagged as "NOT HOME" is inserted. Sure you temporarily loose your defaults and overrides while your "HOME" card isn't there, but it's a far sight better than having the Operating System itself touching your NAND all the time when it doesn't have to.

The problem is that there are literally tons of programs that aren't being worked on by anyone in the scene that are writing to you home directory, and you don't even know it. Every program that is already on the NAND, from every bit and bob in XFCE, your network manager, bash, the very core of the system is constantly writing to your NAND, and it doesn't have to and it really shouldn't be.

Not to mention the fact that you can actually work yourself into a situation where the configs you've mangled in /home/[username]/ on the NAND can put your Pandora into an unusable state, with no other recourse but to reflash. Where if you have home on the First SD card your can just eject the card and get back to a pristine and untouched by anyone or anything Pandora environment.

I've already described a situation in Remmina where as much as I'd have liked to make it HOME-friendly I couldn't because the Operating System itself is already writing to home in an unfriendly way. So, Remmina can't be guaranteed to be home friendly and should be removed from apps.pandora.org, I guess. It won't be the last time something like that happens, either.

 

[milkshake]

@mindlord I totally agee thats the smart thing to do.

@pleng if you think about it you can always store media on another sd card in slot 2 thus not losing any config from ur home dir if mounted to slot 1.

ur probably gonna mention what if u only have one sd card well if thats the case put ur media on ur card and it will show up when inserted and so will ur configs as its on the same card.

for that brief moment ur card might be in ur pc transfering files to it u can use ur pc till its done right? then plop the card back in ur pandora and use that again as it will remount the home and all ur configs simples!

 

[Pleng]

@Pleng if you think about it you can always store media on another sd card in slot 2 thus not losing any config from ur home dir if mounted to slot 1.

No I'm gonna say what if I have 4 or 5 cards, some with apps and some with media, hell maybe some even have a mix. I'm gonna be taking them in and out at random points and there may just be a point where either I *have* to have 2 cards in, neither of which have my home configs, or I just happen to have 2 cards in, neither of which have my home configs (like, you know, I didn't have to do it, that's just the way things rolled).

Anyway I have no problems with the suggestion that it should be an option. So long as Pandora don't start rolling off the shelf with that configuration as default.