[plug] shared /home for dual-booting two distros

[Gavin Chester]

This a newbie-ish question ;-)  Is it feasible to share one /home with
two distros?

Scenario: 
I have two newly-installed distros.  One is an upgrade of a distro I'm
well familiar with, and the other is a distro I trying out as an
alternative (no names, no pack drill ;-) ).  The 'primary' distro was
installed first and I created /home on a separate partition, 'sdc'.
Swap is 'sdb' and I just lumped everything else on 'sda' as a '/'
partition.  I installed the 2nd distro on it's own partition, 'sdd',
leaving the old '/home' as it was.  I dual-boot with grub to decide
which distro to play with.  During the install, I pointed the second
distro to the original (and only) swap partition, 'sdb', and this seems
to be okay for both distros to use in turn.

Straight off, I have some minor glitches because of my inexperience in
doing this.  First, the 2nd distro created its own '/home' in its 'sdd'
partition.  Is there any way I can tell it to use the original '/home'
on 'sdc' _during_ the install?  I thought I had, but not so.  Second,
the original '/home' is not mounting at boot, so I guess I'll have to
manually put it in my fstab.  Other than that I guess I could use hard
links (or symbolic links?) to point the 2nd '/home' to 'sdc.  Is that
right?

However, even once overcoming that minor glitch could I get myself in
knots, with conf files and the like, by trying to run separate versions
of firefox, for example, when I boot each distro in turn and its apps
try to write to the shared '/home'?  I could see that different distros
modify files in different ways, so should I avoid what I'm trying to do?

Thanks, Gavin