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1

Sunday, April 18th 2004, 11:32pm

Kontact Default File Locations

Past Experience with Micro$oft Windows has shown that when software is re-installed, or accounts reset (i.e. wiping out the profile and starting again), non-configuration data that is stored in with the configuration data (the 'outlook.pst' file in the Micro$oft case) is often overlooked and deleted.

I have recently installed and configured the Kontact suite, and have noticed that this appears to do exactly the same thing - i.e. bury important files (knotes, kabc, etc) in with the .kde configuration.

I think it is likely that people may 'blow away' the .kde tree to reset a corrupt kde configuration, or overlook the dot files (.Mail and .kde) when backing up an account.

Would it be worth considering moving data files away out of the .kde tree into a different directory - say korganise, or kde-data to avoid these potential hazards?

Steve Clarke

anda_skoa

Professional

Posts: 1,273

Location: Graz, Austria

Occupation: Software Developer

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2

Monday, April 19th 2004, 8:49pm

freedesktop.org has new standard locations for data and configuration files but their directories are by default also starting with a dot so that they don't show up in the file manager and users don't accidentally delete them.

However distribtors or system admins are free to set this do different (and also "visible" directories).

Anyway, the location is currently only hidden in the sense of not displayed, its not arcane, its usually in .kde/
config data in .kde/share/config
application data in .kde/share/apps

IIRC there is even a tool to backup such files regularily (KBackup or similar named)

Cheers,
_
Qt/KDE Developer
Debian User

3

Tuesday, April 20th 2004, 5:44pm

It's all quite logical when put like that :)

Personally, I like to keep a large distance between configuration (which I don't mind losing), and data (which I do). I like to see config data as dot files, and real useful data as normal files/directories.

Now I understand how tidy the .kde hierarchy actually is, a simple move of 'apps' and '.Mail, and a couple of softlinks makes me very happy.

Thanks for your informative response.

Regards,

Steve Clarke