Common HOME over many versions

[Nils Kassube]

Karl Larsen wrote:
>      I, by myself decided to have a partition loaded by /etc/fstab
> that is my huge collection of things picked up over years. What I
> forgot was that with each new version I wrote a new "thunderbird"
> information for the latest version at /home/karl/.thunderbird. It
> would overwrite what was there for it's thunderbird.
> 
>      Since 10.04 is the newest version using the common /home/karl it
> put it's .thunderbird there and this Thunderbird works fine, but all
> other versions are "broke" . This is really bad since some of my
> hardware things do not work on 10.04 but work fine on the 9.10
> version. But I can't be there because the Thunderbird does not work
> on 9.10.

Upgrade your 9.10 thunderbird to the version from 10.04 - possibly by 
installing the version from a PPA or directly from the Mozilla site 
instead of the one provided by Ubuntu 9.10. That should make it work on 
the older distribution again.

Then rethink your use of a common /home for various distributions. As 
you just found out the hard way, the configuration files of some (many) 
applications are not backward compatible and therefore it can break the 
older distribution. I would suggest to use a common /data partition for 
the various distributions and keep separate /home directories for each 
distribution. Then you don't break the config of an older distribution 
if an application changes the config file syntax. It is definitely more 
work but may be worth the extra effort.


Nils