> Moving the default out of the .sage folder by default would probably  
> not get accepted, but that wouldn't really fix your issues anyways  
> (and you can store the files in whatever folder you want right now).  

Well, there is a whole bunch of issues, and you picked the least
important.  Merely the fact that everything is stored under ".sage"
isn't by itself a problem, it is more of a symptom, namely that the
way the entire Sage storage is organized makes it difficult to back up
or manipulate things at the file system level.

The most serious problem is probably that the source text that I have
written isn't cleanly separated from all the "cached" data that Sage
generates and that the naming on disk is not conducive to doing things
"by hand".  And that is directly related to my problem, since the
source text that I have written is fairly small; I could easily back
that up, upload it, download it, etc.

> Making the "admin" account special would require putting "if  
> user=='admin': ..." checks all over the codebase, which would probably  
> be a tough sell.

That's obviously not a good way of doing it.  A better way would be to
actually compute the paths, either via a function or via a class that
abstracts the paths and storage out.  So, a simple thing might be to
have a "path_for" function that looks something like path_for
(user,notebook,component) or an instance with method calls like
user_paths.get_notebook_path(). That way, a "if user=='admin':" occurs
only in one place, but many other configuration choices become
possible as well.

You will need something like that anyway at some point because in
multiuser installations, paths need to be much more configurable than
they are now.  For example, we really want to put Sage notebooks into
~STUDENT/Sage.  But we might even want different Sage installations
with different sets of notebooks on different servers for different
courses, so each Sage server might actually use something like
~STUDENT/Sage/COURSE/...

Tom

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