[Digikam-users] Separate instances of digikam, different album trees, same machine?

[Jean-François Rabasse]

On Tue, 5 Jun 2012, Carl McGrath wrote:

> Hmm, I had never thought of this until I read this thread, but would assume 
> it would work:

It does work, I'm beeing using that since almost one year.

> Can two users (e.g. userA and userB) be simultaneously running their own, 
> unique, instances of digikam?

Never tried it but it seems to me it should.
The possible « collision » problem is the unique RC configuration file,
but it's unique only on a per user basis.
On a Unix system with two users, each one will have one RC file,
   /home/userA/.kde4/share/config/digikamrc
and
   /home/userB/...



On Wed, 6 Jun 2012, jdd wrote:

> any solution by chrooting digikam?

I don't think so. Chrooting won't solve the configuration file uniqueness
issue, except if you rebuild different home directories in different
chroot jails. And also have your collections directories accessible from
inside the chroot-ed subdir. A bit complicated...



On Wed, 6 Jun 2012, John Stumbles wrote:

> Thanks. Yes, I guessed one could do some smoke and mirrors like that, but 
> then you have to keep stopping one instance and starting the other to swap 
> between them (and digikam's pretty slow starting up with a large collection) 
> so that would be pretty painful!

Right, you can't swap, you have to choose to work with either one setup
or the other, but not at the same time.

> Another way would be to run one within a virtual machine or as another
> user on the system but that's fairly horrible too!

:-) Horrible, yes.

Well, I really think the good way is to expect a future version of DK
with *ALL* configuration (database directory, RC parameters file, ...) 
settable from command line options.
This would make the software independant of any user environment, and
creating shell aliases with different command lines could be trivial.
But as for today, I don't known what can be done around this issue
except some « bidouille » (in French:-)


Jean-François