Re: [gentoo-dev] GLEP81 and /home

["Michał Górny" <mgorny@gentoo.org>]

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On Sat, 2020-01-18 at 12:51 -0500, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
> We forbid packages from installing to /home for good reason: for most of
> history, users (and their home directories) were outside the purview of
> the package manager. But with GLEP81, that's changed: the package
> manager is now in charge of creating each system user's home directory
> and of giving it the correct permissions and ownership.
> 
> Is the policy against installing to /home still consistent?
> 
> For example: the mail-filter/amavisd-new daemon needs a user, typically
> called "amavis". The daemon also needs a working directory that it can
> write to. The obvious choice for a working directory is /var/lib/amavis,
> but there's a catch: spamassassin, razor, pyzor, et cetera (which are
> all used by amavis) store their configuration in the current user's home
> directory, and not in some daemon-specific location. So "amavis" needs a
> home directory, because that's where much of the configuration for
> amavisd goes.
> 
> Where do we put amavis's home directory?
> 
>   1 /var/lib/amavis is a bad idea, because it conflicts with the working
>     directory (we don't want the two packages to get out of sync, nor do
>     we want to keep them in-sync manually).
> 

Sounds like you've created an arbitrary rule that prevents the two
packages from using the same directory, and therefore you've created
this problem yourself.  Why not just go back and reconsider using
the same directory instead of adding complexity for ideological reasons?

Is it really that problematic to have the directory created by amavisd
user, and have all packages depend on it?

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny


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