Ivan Shmakov wrote: > I do remember filing a bug or two against packages that refer to > the getent () data to find the user's “home” directory instead > of using the HOME environment variable. > > The environment is the preferred place to check for this kind of > things: it's (usually) under the full control of the user, and > it's quite possible to run several instances of a single program > using different environments (with different executable file > search PATH's, locales, time zones, etc.), which occasionally > turns to be an immense aid to debugging. (Want to use the > all-defaults configuration for a program? Just start it like: > $ HOME="$(mktemp -dt -- foo.XXXXXXXX)" foo) > > Now, Glib has g_get_home_dir (), whose description reads [1]: > > --cut-- > Gets the current user's home directory as defined in the password > database. > > Note that in contrast to traditional UNIX tools, this function > prefers passwd entries over the HOME environment variable. > --cut-- > > I believe that this behavior is buggy.
Agreed entirely. In particular, it breaks the very common use case of running a program with sudo. "sudo foo" leaves $HOME set to the user's home directory rather than root, so that foo will use the same configuration either way. A user can then use sudo -H or sudo -i if they want a more rootish environment. Other programs that don't respect $HOME include ssh, which forces ugly workarounds like this: sudo ssh -o UserKnownHostsFile=$HOME/.ssh/known_hosts ... - Josh Triplett -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20120927213859.GA7282@jtriplet-mobl1
