[brailleblaster] Re: User Directories

  • From: Michael Whapples <mwhapples@xxxxxxx>
  • To: brailleblaster@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2012 20:52:54 +0100

On storing things in memory, let the user decide. I have 8GB of RAM in this computer, I have seen 16GB at reasonable prices, for some its not a concern about filling up RAM.


For those where it might be, they probably would not have configured a Linux system to mount /tmp in memory.

Michael Whapples
On 22/10/2012 20:48, John J. Boyer wrote:
Good points. These things will be tken care of in time. Putting the temp
files in memory may not be a good idea, since some of them can be quite
large. But it might be for SSD storage.

John

On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 08:28:09PM +0100, Michael Whapples wrote:
There are a few things I was going to comment on in the past regarding
directories.

Firstly, its not good where the BrailleBlaster directory is on the Mac,
possibly also on Linux although I have not checked that one. The first
problem is that the directory name is not prefix with a dot (.), the
unix convention of being hidden. This means it will show up with the ls
command. On Windows, this probably should not be done.

The second issue as to where the directory is on the Mac, not an issue
so much on Linux (I think) the directory is directly in the user's home
directory, the Mac has other directories for application settings and
such like.

A different issue relates to the temp files of BrailleBlaster. These are
being place in non-system temp directories, therefore only
BrailleBlaster can clean these up (IE. in Windows disk clean up utility
will never clear temp files). Another issue with not putting temp files
in proper temp directories is the potential loss of performance, on
Linux (don't know about other platforms) some users mount /tmp as a in
memory file system, therefore it is not slowed by disk access. Also by
using the actual disk for temp files it may annoy some users as it may
put unnecessary wear on storage devices, SSD being the obvious one where
users may get annoyed as SSD are said to have a more limited rewrite
capability.

Michael Whapples
On 22/10/2012 19:54, John J. Boyer wrote:
I think that instead of having a settings directory in the user's
brlblst directory we should have a complete programData directory. After
all, the user may want to define their own styles, Braille tables, etc.
This directory would be structured the same as the BrailleBlaster
programData directory, but would ontain only things that the user had
defined. It would be searched first when a file was needed.

John



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