[arch-general] [PATCH] devtools: give a writable home to nobody for use in makechrootpkg

[Gaetan Bisson]

[2010-08-23 16:46:09 +0200] Pierre Schmitz:
> On Mon, 23 Aug 2010 11:21:20 +0200, Gaetan Bisson
> <bisson at archlinux.org> wrote:
> > This is to ensure $HOME is a writable directory during makechrootpkg
> > runs. I suspect this is helpful to build various packages - in the
> > example I have in mind (uim in [extra]), the home directory was
> > determined by getpwuid(getuid())->pw_dir, so simply exporting a new HOME
> > environment variable in the PKGBUILD wasn't enough.
> 
> I would say if a build or package function tries to write file in a
> user's home directory it should be considered broken and the PKGBUILD
> should be fixed.

I completely agree that it's broken to write to $HOME at build time.

Nevertheless, when a package does that and uses getpwuid() to determine
the home directory, there is no way that I know of to deal with this
solely in the PKGBUILD: the source must be patched, for instance to use
getent("HOME") rather than getpwuid(), which is, in my opinion, not as
satisfying a fix as simply setting ~nobody to /build.

That said, well, both fixes work... :)

-- 
Gaetan