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Re: ${HOME} vs. g_get_home_dir () [and 1 more messages]



Le jeudi 27 septembre 2012 à 10:06 +0200, Bjørn Mork a écrit : 
> This is not a technical issue at all.  It is about breaking user
> expectations by breaking conventions.  

No, this is about breaking YOUR expectations.

But what former SunOS 5.6 users expect is not necessarily what other
users expect.

I expect programs to use my real home, regardless of whatever crap could
have been put in the environment (and there are really too many things
that fiddle with $HOME incorrectly).

> Is it OK for Debian to break user expectations?

This question can be turned around against you in the same way.

> I believe changing XAUTHORITY from default is part of the same upstream
> problem.

Moving XAUTHORITY was part of avoiding issues on network homes.

> Although that change can be claimed to be within the limits of
> the documentation, bug reports like http://bugs.debian.org/614972
> clearly demonstrates that it breaks user expectations. 

Thanks for pointing to this bug, which shows that user expectations are
not necessarily “XAUTHORITY=~/.Xauthority” but “my X server is
accessible from the outside provided I have the permissions”.

Which was solved in a much better way than just going back to the
previous set of bugs.

> There seems to be an upstream problem here which goes a lot deeper than
> a few weird defaults...

To me this looks like a classical change management problem.  Just
because we did things in a certain way for 30 years doesn’t mean this
way is best.

Cheers,
-- 
 .''`.      Josselin Mouette
: :' :
`. `'
  `-


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