Re: pkgsrc littering the home directory

[Marc Espie <espie%nerim.net@localhost>]

On Mon, Feb 04, 2008 at 11:41:40AM +0100, Tobias Nygren wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> As as pure side-effect of compiling packages, my user got the following
> directories created for it in it's home directory:
> 
> .config, .gconf, .gconfd, .ghc, .gstreamer-0.10,
> .gstreamer-0.8, .kde, .qt, .wapi
> 
> I propose setting MAKE_ENV+=HOME=${WRKDIR:Q}/.home by default in pkgsrc.
> I'd also like to warn if this directory is nonempty when PKG_DEVELOPER
> is set. Can anyone see a reason this could be bad? I realise that there
> may still be packages that use getpwuid(getuid)->pw_dir or similar.
> Perhaps they can be fixed differently.

This is a very good idea, you wouldn't believe how many ports can be tweaked
when they find something `interesting' under $HOME. Leads to countless
`works for me' messages and bug-hunting for configuration differences that
lead to a port compiling/not compiling depending on your system.


In OpenBSD, we went one step further and define HOME=/${PKGNAME}_writes_to_HOME

since we build stuff as !root, this shows up as `interesting' warning messages
whenever one of these ports tries to write at the root of the filesystem.

Some are easy to fix, some less so.

If someone finds the time, I would be very interested in patches to let
the qt tools behave... their model is that they create the .qt dir and
populate it with a default configuration even when all you do is read
the configuration.