Re: [sabayon] Home dir of sabayon

[Mark McLoughlin <markmc redhat com>]

On Wed, 2005-03-02 at 07:40 -0500, Daniel Veillard wrote:
>   I just checked out the CVs version of sabayon. I notice that
> its home dir has been removed, and that apparently the code expects to
> build it on the fly. However this seems to just not work for me. Gconf
> yells at the result and fills up the syslog with:
> 
> Mar  2 13:27:08 paphio gconfd (sabayon-15972): starting (version 2.8.1), pid 15972 user 'sabayon' 
> Mar  2 13:27:08 paphio gconfd (sabayon-15972): Owner of /tmp/orbit-sabayon is not the current user  

	This is the real problem, not the GConf warnings. Its probably that the
sabayon UID got changed. I thought I'd fixed that, though, by making
sure the sabayon user isn't removed and re-added during upgrade.

	(And yeah, its a bad bug that GConf barfs like this. There's an
unfinished patch in bugzilla for it.)

>   I wonder why the static home path was changed why there was no discussion
> about it on the list and the ISSUE file still list this this as an unresolved
> matter. I think that applications may record home path and do not expect them
> to change from one launch to another. I think this change fragilize the 
> ability to actually record application preferences, it makes writing special
> handlers for configuration files harder and is not justified (it may look
> more secure but I'm not convinced it actually is since the general Unix login
> protection mechanism should applies to sabayon).

	I thought it was the idea of creating the sabayon user on the fly that
really worried you rather than creating the homedir?

	So, the reasons I changed it to this way was:

  + We need to start with a fresh clean homedir each time
  + We could just delete everything in /var/sabayon each time, but I'd
    be worried that people might put stuff in there not expecting it
    to be deleted
  + it re-enforces the notion that the sabayon user isn't a real user

	And, as for the "apps might save the homedir path in prefs" problem ...
we need to tackle that anyway. Even if the homedir is /var/sabayon and
some app does something silly like
saving /var/sabayon/.gnome/panel2.d/launchers/foo.desktop in its
preferences, then we're going to need to fix the path anyway whenever we
apply the profile to a real user.

Cheers,
Mark.