Home folder location

Question

In our lab environment we have local home folders for all users, but the home folder name does NOT equal the short name of the user who logins. For example, the home folder in Users is called Local HomeDir. The user who authenticated ldap and logs in is mtstest. When they startup Color, it starts erroring stating it can't find /Users/mtstest/documents/color.... and then attempts to create it, which of course, it can't so I get the error message that it can't create it and then quits Color.
I ended up having to have a script run at login and logout that creates a symlink to the user's login name to the local homedir folder.
I've never had this problem with ANY FCP product. Is this a new "feature"? Does Color support home dirs that aren't in the users folder or aren't the same as the users' logged in name?
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Part of the issue is that normally when Color launches for the first time you're asked to choose the location of the media directory (this is what I'm assuming you mean when you say you have changed the location), however, if you don't have the appropriate folder in /Users/, you get various error dialogs stating it cannot find/create the folder, then after dimissing these Color will crash.
Looking at the Preferences.prf file in ~/Library/Preferences/Color/ you can see:
<prjdir>/Users/markwarren/Documents/Color Documents/</prjdir>
<rdrdir>/Users/markwarren/Documents/Color Documents/Renders/</rdrdir>
<srcdir>/Users/markwarren/Documents/Color Documents/Media/</srcdir>
It's these paths that the error dialogs reference when they state they cannot find/create the items.
In the example above, Color will work as there is a folder (specifically a users home folder) called markwarren in /Users/. However, if there is no folder in /Users/ that matches the shortname of the logged in user, you will see the errors.
I understand that normally this would not be an issue, as all local accounts would, by default, have a folder whose name is the shortname of the user account in /Users/. However, it is possible you may wish to have a shared local home folder, or use a product that provides this functionality, or, alternatively, have a network based home folder. In any of these additional scenarios you will see the issue with Color.
Rather than have these error dialogs appear and finally having Color crash after dismissing them, it might have been better for Color to display the dialog allowing you to select the media directory, if it could not access the one as defined in the pref file. That or perhaps paths should not be stored in the pref file, of if you have to do this, use "~/" rather than "/Users/nameofuser/", or better still, just use a standard OS call to find the location of the home folder and work out the path from that.