Re: [gentoo-dev] GLEP81 and /home

[Michael Orlitzky <mjo@gentoo.org>]

On 1/19/20 2:32 PM, Alec Warner wrote:
> 
> Earlier you wrote:
> ----
>  * The daemon DOES NOT need a home directory for its user.
>   * I DO NOT want to install anything to anyone's home directory.
>   * With respect to user.eclass, I'm proposing that /home be treated
>     EXACTLY THE SAME as it always has been.
> ---
> 
> So my question is "why not leave the homedir unset, or set it to /dev/null?"
> The claim is that the daemon doesn't need a home directory, so why are
> we trying to make one?
> 

Ah, good question. As the de facto no-homedir police, even I think this
case warrants an exception. Technically, the daemon's user does not need
a home directory. But almost everyone that uses amavis will want to
combine it with one of these programs that looks in $HOME.

We could install the user with no homedir, and make the people who need
it override the acct-user ebuild in an overlay, but that's a pain in the
butt. Since the common case will utilize a home directory, I'd rather
pick one decent location upstream, and not have 99% of users define one
ad-hoc in an overlay.

The reason I'm being so annoying is because it's important to get the
location right. Every time the user package is reinstalled, its homedir
gets reset. So it's non-trivial to override, and can't really be changed
in an ebuild (usermod fails if the user is running a process).