Pete Haworth wrote:
I guess the question here is where on earth are you supposed to put an
application's files if you want them to be available to all users? It seems
like /Library/Application Support makes sense but apparently Apple have
decided otherwise. I hope they have published a guideline somewhere that
explains how to handle this situation.
The rules haven't changed all that much; it's more like a prudent
closure of a security exposure.
Allowing all processes to write to the system's Library is dangerous.
Problem solved in Lion.
So what do we do?
Nothing much different from how it's been for the last decade:
Applications: most of an app's files go here, including the executable
and other components like stack files and externals, all
the essentials you app needs to run
Preferences: user-specific settings for the app
Application Support: Apple says, "These are the files that your
application creates and manages on behalf of the user
and can include files that contain user data."
The use of App Support is rather loosely defined, its distinction from
Preferences not exactly clear. Given that many users are comfortable
ditching the prefs for an app, I would use App Support for those files
which are more central to the app than preferences, need to be writable,
and are not documents. For example, an RSS reader might puts its URL DB
and cache in there.
But I must admit I've never yet had a need for it. It's rather
specialized; the subset of things that aren't essential to running the
app (which should be in the bundle) and aren't user-specific settings
(which should be in Prefs) is slim.
If I did need to use it, I'd make sure the app contained copies of the
files it needs to put there, checked for them at startup, and if not
found would write the initial set of files to the user's App Support
folder. By putting the smarts for this into the app, all users have the
same starting point.
In the even slimmer case where you need to have one user's settings
affect other users, I would consider the Shared folder. It may or may
not be what Apple would suggest, but it's a very rare case anyway and
AFAIK neither OS X, Window, or Linux provides a globally-writable space
for such things other than the Shared folder or its equivalent on other
platforms.
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World
LiveCode training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
Webzine for LiveCode developers: http://www.LiveCodeJournal.com
LiveCode Journal blog: http://LiveCodejournal.com/blog.irv
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