Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!rpi!usenet
From: Garance_Drosehn@mts.rpi.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.system
Subject: Re: Misuse of the system folder...
Summary: networked vs home Macs
Message-ID: <6+dgbkb@rpi.edu>
Date: 10 Apr 91 18:01:09 GMT
References: <1991Apr10.093946.22779@allgfx.agi.oz>
Reply-To: gad@eclipse.its.rpi.edu
Organization: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Lines: 51
Nntp-Posting-Host: gilead.its.rpi.edu

In article <1991Apr10.093946.22779@allgfx.agi.oz> 
           tkav@allgfx.agi.oz (Tony Kavadias) writes:
>This is too much!
>
>I looked at my system folder one day and I thought "Apple made a system folder
>for a reason - why are programs like PageMaker, Stuffit Classic, Excel, Word,
>and hundreds of others all putting APPLICATION SPECIFIC files into a folder
>which is designed for GLOBAL use????!!!!"  I see preferences files all over
>the place in an ever-crowding folder.
>
>The system folder is intended to hold files which may be used GLOBALLY, by ALL
>applications (or at least by more than one). Why on earth are developers
writing
>applications which make their own files in the system folder if the files are
>not to be intentionally shared?  That is what I call spastic!  They should be
>stored in the same directory as the one the application was launched from. 
NOT
>IN THE SYSTEM FOLDER!
 ...(remainder skipped)...

As I use Macs at work, I have more of an understanding of why things are
getting tossed into the system folder.  That works well in a networked
environment, where there is a file server that has all the applications on it
while each Mac user is allowed to have their own preferences.  By having the
preferences files in an easy-to-find place, everything works out ok.

And yet on my Mac at home this same behavior really bugs me.  At home all the
applications are used by me and only me.  More importantly, at home I have a
few different disks each of which has a different system folder (one for 6.0.5,
one for 6.0.7, one for a Hebrew/English system, etc).  So I pick the bootup
device depending on which *system* I want to run.

The problem then is that all those system folders contain stuff that has
nothing to do with the system per se.  I have to duplicate preference files all
over the place, or run the risk of having the different systems get out of
synch.  This seems particularly silly for things like "WriteNow preferences" or
my check-writing information (Checkwriter II puts all of the checking and
checking-account related info into the system folder too).

Will the aliases of system 7.0 help us out here, so we can have just one set of
preference files no matter how many different systems are setup?  Or couldn't
the Mac system have some other special folder for *non*-system files, so that
the system folder would contain nothing more than the files related to the
actual system software?

There are times when I get the feeling that after a few more years my hard disk
is going to have just one folder at the top level, a "System Folder" that has
everything else inside of it...  Right now (here at work) I have 50 meg used on
my hard drive, and 5.6 meg of that is in my system folder.

Garance_Drosehn@mts.rpi.edu