On Mon, 18 Dec 2017 06:23:13 -0500 Temlakos temlakos@gmail.com wrote:
As I thought. Now may I also assume that you use the chown command to re-create the ownership and group-membership structure of each specific user directory in the new drive? And also use chmod to re-create the permissions structure? I'm familiar enough with chown and chmod. I've used them often enough in my days as a volunteer developer on other sites that use UNIX.
Yep.
In any event, let me guess: whatever you create and set in the new drive, no re-installation will ever alter. Thereafter you remove any directories in /home/user (where /user/ is the name of a user account) and re-establish the links, right?
Yep.
I should have figured one thing: I do this for everything that I used to copy over from one computer to the next when I would break in a new(er) computer with (of necessity) a fresh (first!) installation of Fedora. That included all the named directories, any other top-level directories I created, and /home/user/.thunderbird in every account that used Thunderbird regularly. (Same with Kmail, for any KDE user who uses the "native" browser and e-mail client.)
As Tim points out, this can cause problems if configuration options have changed. Better to just let the newer version create its own config, try the app, and if it works the way you want, leave it the way it is. If it doesn't work the way you want, do a diff with the old config to see what has changed, and make changes in the new config based on those.