[Labs-l] No space left on device - bots project

[Ryan Lane]

> The fact that you've so often had to remind people not to use ~/ suggests
> that it violates people's intuitions and expectations about UNIX
> environments. That's certainly been my experience: I keep having to remind
> myself not to pile things up in ~/, which forces me to have to rethink a
> lot of things that have become practically muscle memory, like setting up a
> virtualenv under ~/ for various handy Python packages.
>
> Are the reasons for deprecating the use of ~/ for storage of personal
> files fundamental to the architecture of labs? If not, I think it'd be
> worth reconsidering.
>
>
It violates expectations of private UNIX environments, yes.

In shared environments, using ~ for things other than environment and
temporary (private) data storage it's generally discouraged. Toolserver is
set up to be very user-centric rather than being community-centric, so it's
model focuses heavily on home directories.

Labs is configured to be community-centric. If someone stops running a bot,
for instance, someone else should be able to take over that bot. When home
directories are used to run stuff it makes it much more difficult to change
ownership. This is especially the case when things like virtualenv are used
in home directories (since dependencies aren't tracked, it may not work
between ubuntu versions, etc).

- Ryan
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