Re: [gentoo-dev] GLEP81 and /home

[Michael Orlitzky <mjo@gentoo.org>]

On 1/18/20 2:03 PM, Alec Warner wrote:
> 
> I tend to agree that in theory keeping the working directory and home
> directory the same is not ideal. However  I'm not really aware of any
> practical problems. Haven't we basically run in this configuration for
> years? What kind of issues does it pose (outside of "well it sounds like
> not the best idea?")

There have been numerous bugs and mailing list discussions about the
problems it causes, but it's kind of a moot point here. The best reason
to avoid re-using /var/lib/amavis as the daemon's home directory is
because it really is treated like a home directory by all of these
packages, and we shouldn't dump a user's dotfiles into a daemon's
working directory without a good reason.

(We haven't been running this configuration for years, because we
haven't had the GLEP81 eclasses that clobber your permissions for years.)


> Agreeing with ulm here. I think the potential struggle for (3) is that
> conceptually /home is not always system specific. If /home is shared,
> you could end up with a bad time (e.g. I *don't* want /home/amavis
> shared across all my hosts, how would I manage multiple versions?

All of the upstream packages treat $HOME as user configuration. If you
want to run two different daemons with two different configurations and
if those configurations are sourced from $HOME, then you make two
different users. There is no problem here.

I'm willing to pick something like /var/lib/amavis-home, but that's
clearly just second-guessing the administrator and putting a home
directory somewhere it doesn't belong to avoid a QA warning.

We have a similar situation with spamd in spamassassin itself, and I'd
rather not maintain my own fake /home hierarchy as /var/lib/$user-home.