I would like to create an acct-user package for the 'portage' user, but I'm having trouble deciding on a home directory.
baselayout currently sets it to /var/tmp/portage, and this just seems like a bad idea to me. I'm pretty sure we have a QA policy against installing files there anyway. If we set the home directory to /dev/null, this may cause problems for unit tests that expect the account to have a valid home directory. For example, see this bug report for app-shells/ksh, which is about a test case that fails when the HOME environment variable is unset. It also fails if the home directory is not a directory (/dev/null). https://github.com/att/ast/issues/1391 /x/portage/app-shells/ksh-2020.0.0_beta1/work/ksh-2020.0.0_beta1-build/src/cmd/ksh93/ksh[5]: cd: /dev/null: [Not a directory] <E> builtins[494]: cd with no arguments fails if HOME is unset <W> builtins[-1]: error_count = 1 So, I guess we should pick somewhere to create an empty directory for portage. Any suggestions?
