Bug#679751: please clarify package account and home directory location in policy
Package: debian-policy
Severity: normal
Hi,
many packages have to create system accounts on installation.
Unfortunately, Debian policy is not quite clear on how to handle
these. On the other hand, Debian QA is keen on addressing issues in
account handling, which frequently leads to discussions about how to
handle things like that, resulting in maintainer time being wasted to
make unncessary changes to a package that could have been done "right"
in the first place.
#621833 has a lengthy discussion about what happens to an account on
package removal / purge, but other things are stil open and
unaddressed by Policy.
I won't address the old user name (package versus Dpackage versus
Debian-package versus debian-package) issue here since the discussions
about that have died down in the last years and one gets away pretty
well with Debian-package.
But I need to address the "where to put a users' home dir" issue.
Recently, QA has filed quite some bugs about system users' home dirs
not being allowed in /home, (mis)interpreting the FHS (chapter /home)
at this point, saying
/home : User home directories (optional)
/home is a fairly standard concept, but it is clearly a site-specific
filesystem. [9] The setup will differ from host to host. Therefore, no
program should rely on this location.
Unfortunately, Policy is not clear on where a system accounts' "home
directory" is to be placed. Thus, a maintainer trying to fix the "bug"
that a home directory was placed *gasp* in /home is risking to do it
wrong again when choosing between /etc/package(/home) and
/var/(lib|cache|spool)/package(/home).
In quite a few packages, the system user's "home" directory might
accumulate dotfiles and/or ssh (keys|known_hosts) files, so this
decision is not quite easy to take.
I would love to have policy clearly say where a system users' home
directory is to be placed. This saves a lot of maintainer time and
grief with QA actions. If this were clearly laid out in Policy, QA
would also be saved from discussions with grumpy maintainers like me,
since they would have a clear reference to cite without having to bend
FHS.
Sorry, but I cannot suggest Policy language since I don't know how do
to things right and I still believe that /home is a valid place for
home directories.
Greetings
Marc
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