Common writable folders

[Richard Gaskin]

Mark Schonewille wrote:

> Only admins can install applications that are available to all users.  
> If a user is not an admin, you will have to write to the user's  
> application support/data folder, which means that only the current  
> user can use the application. Operating systems are designed this way  
> to prevent limited users from messing up the entire system.

Of course, and I have no problem with the application installation 
requiring an admin.

But after it's installed, there are some features which could benefit 
from being available to all users.   To restrict the availability of 
these features to admins seriously limits their usefulness, esp. in 
university lab environments where there may be only one admin for a 
hundred users.

For user-created documents it would be easy enough to just require them 
to navigate to any non-OS-restricted volume when saving.  But in this 
case the data isn't explicitly user-generated; it's done automatically 
by the app for stuff used by the app internally, the sort of thing one 
might normally find in "Application Support" (Mac) or "Application Data" 
(Win), but of benefit to all users hence my question.

I suppose I have an easy out:  if users complain about not having 
certain features using the same data for all users, I can just tell them 
that it certainly isn't my decision, it was made for us by OS vendors, 
and point them to the OS vendor support page.

But that seems a clumsy and ultimately unproductive option.  I was 
hoping that OS vendors anticipated the usefulness of common data, and 
provided at least one directory accessible by all for that purpose.

In the meantime I'll add an option for admins to assign a 
non-OS-restricted volume during install for such data as a workaround....

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Media Corporation
  ___________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com       http://www.FourthWorld.com