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Re: Document /homeless-shelter?
From: |
Leo Famulari |
Subject: |
Re: Document /homeless-shelter? |
Date: |
Sun, 16 Jan 2022 00:20:49 -0500 |
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.