Subject: bug#78152: [guix-daemon] Build user's pw_dir != HOME

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 05 May 2025 14:54:51 +0200

Hi Maxim,

Maxim Cournoyer <[email-masked]> writes:

> There is a discrepancy in our build environment, where the build user's
> directory is set to '/' while HOME is set to '/homeless-shelter'.
> Normally both should match, and it trips some test suite that assumes
> this to be the case, as with libssh's [0].
>
> Perhaps '/homeless-shelter' could be made to more simply be '/', or
> pw_dir could be made to be '/homeless-shelter'.
>
> What do you think?

As a rule of thumb, the build environment should never change so that
things that derivations that succeeded one day still succeed years
later.

So my take is that we should live with this discrepancy forever and
ever.

(Note that the unprivileged daemon does introduce some discrepancies,
and this is something we should fix as much as possible.)

Thanks,
Ludo’.