Re: [gnome-love] Best way to run Development/CVS Gnome?

[Elijah Newren <newren gmail com>]

On 7/10/05, Christian Kirbach <Christian Kirbach student uni-siegen de> wrote:
> On Sun, 10 Jul 2005 06:13:21 +0200, Elijah Newren <newren gmail com> wrote:
>
> > The first time I did
> > so (well, also when I used garnome before I switched to jhbuild), I
> > created a separate user and logged in as them when using the
> > development version of Gnome.  But problems were rare enough that I
> > stopped doing that and I no longer use a separate account; I just do

> Personally I strongly recommend a seperate user account for the
> cvs/unstable GNOME if you do not want to jeopardise your user account data
> (document etc). I really wouldn't want to lose the current state of my diploma
> thesis.

Losing account data?  Yes, I guess it's possible, but I've never lost
any[1] and I've done this for a couple years now.   I work on my
dissertation while logged into a development version of Gnome all the
time (though not with a development version of emacs or LaTeX ;-)  On
the other hand, I have lost data from hard drive failures as well as
from user error (yeah, I've used rm -rf on the wrong directory before,
accidentally copied files over other import ones, and various other
stupid things), but this is stuff that happens regardless of the
stability of the userland software you run.  So, if your data is
important, you should either put it under a revision control system
(with the repository on a different machine) or make regular backups
anyway.

Granted, there's nothing wrong with being paranoid, especially when it
comes to important data, but if you're already taking steps to protect
your important stuff (which you should be doing anyway), I don't see
this as being a big issue; in my experience at least, it's a much
smaller issue than other problems that could occur.

Just my $0.02 (before adjustment for inflation),
Elijah

[1] I have had Gnome settings get messed up (and had to clean them out
and restart with the defaults) or had programs that wouldn't launch
(and had to debug or compile an older version for), but I've never
lost any of my files or anything.