Shared collections

[ars-vita]

It could be a good idea to have shared collections (along with the private ones) in order to enable users having standard tool chains.

I have in mind the following setup. When user just starts his/her terminal, a default (shared) collection is getting loaded, which consists only of the shared modules. In this way, a user can do whatever he/she wants with the environment being confident that anytime he/she can restore it to the initial state using:

$ module restore

Along with the default (shared) collection an administrator creates other shared collections that represent standard tool chains that user can always rely on.

For now I am using the following workaround. I create collections and move them to the shared modulefiles folder under superuser ownership. Each user can create a link in his own .module directory pointing to the shared collection. This is maybe not the best way to manage shared collections but as a workaround it works.

[cmarqu]

Nice idea, I would use this feature. Let me just suggest the term "baseline" for it (as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseline_(configuration_management)).