Of course it should be possible to use something else. The point with a preferred place is primarily that it gives a well-known name to talk about - one can say for instance "check in your ~/pike-modules directory" instead of "check in the directory where you've chosen to have pike modules in your home directory". Even if someone actually using a different directory he will still know what is meant.
/ Martin Stjernholm, Roxen IS
Previous text:
2003-10-30 20:31: Subject: Re: module build process
On Thu, Oct 30, 2003 at 07:55:04PM +0100, Martin Stjernholm, Roxen IS @ Pike developers forum wrote:
on OSX, every user gets $HOME/Library, so perhaps the best place isn't the same for each system...
Maybe not, but a standard place regardless of platform is clearly useful otoh. Would there be a tangible benefit placing it in that directory on OS-X?
yes, less clutter, and less iritation for the user. i hate it how hundreds of apps place stuff in my homedir with sometimes making it hard to know which file belongs to which app.
on macosx at least all that mess disappears in a subdirecory. (and it's less messy, because each app has it's own subdirectory)
hence on macosx there can only be one good place: $HOME/Library/Pike/
for the same reason i do not like $HOME/pike-modules/ or $HOME/pike/ chances are that i already have a directory like that to maintain my own code and don't want pike to accidently overwrite anything there.
my point is, we can't just pick a directory and use it. if we pick a directory we must check if it doesn't exist already, otherwise abort. in general i prefer asking the user to specify a directory.
greetings, martin.
/ Brevbäraren