Wisdom of storing help files in user directory

Question

What is the wisdom of storing the following reference files in the user's directory?

Might I have done something when installing XCode for them to go to ~/Library instead of, say, /Library ?

1.8G ~/Library/Developer/Shared/Documentation/DocSets/

0.3G ~/Library/Developer/Shared/Documentation/DocSets/com.apple.ADC_Reference_Library.DeveloperTools.4_3.docset

1.0G ~/Library/Developer/Shared/Documentation/DocSets/com.apple.adc.documentation.AppleLion.CoreReference.docset

0.5G ~/Library/Developer/Shared/Documentation/DocSets/com.apple.adc.documentation.AppleiOS5_1.iOSLibrary.docset

Answer 1

These files come from Xcode's Preferences -> Downloads -> Documentation panel, which downloads and updates documentation.

After a fresh install of Mountain Lion and Xcode, without doing anything special, I found the files there too.

Xcode may be putting these files in the user's home directory because the user doesn't by default have permission to write in /Library, or because different users may have different sets of documentation files.

In any case, it is user hostile to dump over 4 GB of non-user files in a user's directory, hopefully the Xcode team will fix this eventually.

In the meantime I'd try moving it to /Library/Developer/Shared and see if things still work.

Answer 2

Here are several cases where having documentation in the user home folder make sense:

1. Each user of the Xcode program has different bookmarks, needs, choices of what to download
2. Backup situations where only user files are preserved (common in corporate situations where they image and deploy apps systematically and therefore skip backing up files that come from the standard deployment process).
3. Networked home folders where you work from more than one Mac would cause another location to fail.

Gatekeeper and other code signing / security checking technology makes it poor form to store added content (or content that updates outside the normal app update process) in /Applications. /Users/Shared is not a good place to store things since it breaks under the network home folder use case. Thus ~ is left as the least bad place to store this content.