Comment 2 for bug 1260990

Manually creating a /var/lib/boinc-client dir solves the bug, but if this is done by the package itself at install I wonder if apt will see this as a conflict with the boinc-client package, since both would create (and thus "own", apt-wise) the same dir.

Also, in boinc-client this dir is owned by a "boinc:boinc" user and group, so boinc-manager would probably have to mimic that too, which may lead to more conflicts.

Does anyone know how apt deals with packages that creates the same users, groups and dirs? A clumsy solution would be to create a "boinc-common" base package that creates this "infrastructure", and set both boinc-client and boinc-manager to depend on that.

Another completely different approach, and perhaps a better solution: if the problem is only the .desktop file that contains a Path= entry pointing to an nonexisting dir, what if instead of a Path= entry we use boincmgr --datadir /var/lib/boinc-client in the Exec= entry? Gnome/Unity would not complain anymore, but would boincmgr complain if we use a nonexisting dir as datadir? Would it (a) bork (b) create the dir or (c) work just fine ? If (c), then problem solved. (b) is fine, as long as it doesn't conflict if/when boinc-client is installed later (will it change the ownership to boinc:boinc?). But, if (a), we have a problem :P