Well-known AG configuration directories

[Robert Olson]

I'd like to have the AG system define the following configuration 
directories. I realize this is being done now, but these go toward 
documenting & codifying current practice (and providing standard names).

Per-user configuration.
This will hold things like the user profile, defaults, and a user's 
certificate repository.

Defaults:
Linux: $HOME/.AccessGrid
Windows has the notion of an Application Data directory. This can be 
retrieved programmatically thusly:

from win32com.shell import shell, shellcon

appData = shell.SHGetFolderPath(0, shellcon.CSIDL_APPDATA, 0, 0)

which on my machine is C:\Documents and Settings\olson\Application Data. I 
think the AG diretcotry should be called <appdata dir>\Access Grid. A win 
of using this directory is that the default permissions result in it being 
unreadable to other users, which makes it a good place for private keys to 
be stored. It may also be a good place for proxy certs to be stored, but if 
roaming profiles are in use it might be a network drive, which isn't 
necessarily a good thing.

Per-systemconfiguration.
This would hold the shared trusted CA repository, and whatever other 
per-machine state makes sense.

Linux: somewhere under /usr/share maybe, wherever is standard.
Windows: there is a similar key CSIDL_COMMON_APPDATA that on my machine 
points to C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data.

Per-service configuration.
This would hold the certificate repository for the service, and a trusted 
CA dir if it is different than the per-machine one.

I suspect this is likely located in the per-machine configuration space 
somewhere.

Temporary storage

This is for things like proxy certs. It needs to be local to the current 
machine.

Linux: /tmp, if we get the naming unique (should be straithforward)
Windows: %TEMP% or win32api.GetTempPath().

We should also provide support for the creation of temporary filenames. The 
Python library has the tempfile module; this may be sufficient; it appears 
to use the %TEMP% setting on Linux. A Win32 APi mechanism for doing the 
same thing is:

  win32api.GetTempFileName(win32api.GetTempPath(), "AG")

API support

we should have API support for all of this. I propose:

Platform.GetUserConfigurationDir()
Platform.GetSystemConfigurationDir()
Platform.GetServiceConfigurationDir(serviceName)
Platform.GetTempDir()

properly done, this will get rid of some of the problems we've run into 
with missing assumed directory names, etc.

--bob 
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