On Sat, Jan 15, 2022 at 10:19:54PM -0500, Matt wrote: > As I understand it, $HOME is set to /homeless-shelter during build because > that's how Nix does/did it and "there’s no home > directory in build environments, and perhaps Eelco Dolstra and others back > then found that setting ‘HOME’ to a non-existing directory broke > fewer builds that leaving it unset."
A further rationale is that by using an obviously strange and bogus value for $HOME, all uses of $HOME in the build container are highlighted. Otherwise, if $HOME was unset, build scripts might fall back to something like $HOME/$USER. To be clear, the situation is not simply that "there's no home directory in the build environment". Rather, there must not be a home directory there. By design, that's a small part of how we ensure that builds are deterministic. In all cases, package builds should not be able to depend on the pathname of a home directory. > Is this something that should be documented, and if so, where? It could be documented briefly in the manual section Build Environment Setup.
