Hello Stephen,

On Mon, Sep 06, 2004 at 10:30:34AM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> YMMV, but I never did get around to putting my home directories on
> Coda (partly because I'm running various versions of things on
> different hosts with different OSes, and I need host-specific configs;

it is an interesting issue, what kind of configs is host-specific?
Why? Is it because of some (local) absolute paths being there or someting
relevant to your terminal (like color depth) ?

I am aware of "brain-damaged" programs like tcsh or icewm (I like icewm
otherwise) - they insist on reading files in fixed places under your homedir
and cannot be convinced to read them from anywhere else, unless you hack
the source and let them use an environment variable or a new command line
switch. Result: no possibility to have several different configs, and no
possibility to run different versions of the program, if the config files
happen to be not version-compatible.

> I also do different things on different hosts, and it's annoying if
> .*_history fills up with irrelevant junk).  The things I did need on

It is the only "real" issue I have seen, that history is being filled up
from different sessions.

It is worth to look at using HISTFILE variable in bash to distinguish
between different tasks (tasks, not hosts).

> AFAIK CMU people have their home directories on Coda.  Maybe Jan could
> explain why this doesn't cause regular conflicts?

I am using home directory on Coda.
Yes, it makes conflicts on .bash_history rather probable.
My approach - to run "cfs strong" before logging out, so that at that moment
I am strongly connected.

Otherwise I'd probably resort to history-file-per-host, which is _wrong_
but it is the shell design (a file with multiple records) which creates
the problem.
Same as mail, old mailbox format causes all kinds of headaches on distributed
fs, while maildir runs smoothly.

Hmm, a toy exercise, to hack a script that creates en ephemeral $HISTORY
per session, and reads/stores the persistent history record in something like
maildir - no big deal to implement, probably :)

> I will second these.  I found repair really stubborn about doing
> anything useful; I ended up just doing discardalllocal in most cases.

So do I - as in 99% of cases it is just history/config files that either bash
or mozilla recreate without a good reason :) 

Regards,
--
Ivan