[MonoDevelop] [Monodevelop-devel] Feedback wanted: Settings and data storage locations

[Michael Hutchinson]

On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 9:11 AM, Rafael Teixeira <monoman at gmail.com> wrote:
> Just a comment on supportting mutliple versions of MD.
>
> In Windows it is very common to have many versions of VisualStudio, as
> they've made it hard to compile old solutions in a really compatible
> way (they are changing the look of  things with VS2010 that, as newer
> versions of MD, can compile targetting different versions of the
> framework), but I still have 4 versions of VisualStudio in my
> workstation (2003, 2005, 2008 and 2010 beta)  and 3 on our build
> servers (no 2010 beta), and they open correctly their respective
> solutions/projects and don't interfere with each other (In truth .sln
> files are associated with a helper VisualStudio-Version auto-selector
> application).
>
> Said that, I don't think MD needs to support multiple released
> versions installed side-by-side, but it would be nice if a development
> (or preview/beta release), could be installed to another prefix and
> could take it in account to keep per-user data in a separate root:
>
> For instance a development build installed to \usr\local prefix could
> use \usr\local\home\$User\ or perhaps \home\$User\.local\
> in linux. Or perhaps, all your suggested paths would use
> MonoDevelopPreview instead of MonoDevelop, for non-release builds.
>
> That would allow to also concoct tests for configuration migration
> between versions of MD and of independently released addins, even
> after your proposed wholesale migration.

On Linux you can override the ~/local/share and ~/.config with
environment variables XDG_DATA_HOME and XDG_CONFIG_HOME.
http://go-mono.com/docs/index.aspx?link=T%3aSystem.Environment.SpecialFolder

And we could easily add another env var to override the location
properties in MD.

-- 
Michael Hutchinson
http://mjhutchinson.com