Ports Accessing $HOME

[Joshua Root]

On 2011-9-1 06:06 , Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> 
> On Aug 31, 2011, at 14:03, Jeremy Lavergne wrote:
> 
>> Do we consider ports that create and use a shared memory file in $HOME an
>> mtree violation? This would be during the build and/or test phases [1].
>>
>> How would we "properly" get around such a situation? Will that also
>> account for a working mpab chroot (hopefully it'll work again, someday).
>>
>> 1. https://trac.macports.org/ticket/30641
> 
> Well, an mtree violation is by definition a port that installs files to locations that are not specified in the mtree. But here we're talking about a port that merely creates a temporary file during the build, not something the port ultimately installs. So it's not an mtree violation. But it is definitely not allowed, at the moment, for a port to be attempting to create a file in $HOME, hence the error in the aforemetioned ticket. We had $HOME set to /dev/null on trunk before MacPorts 2.0.0 was released; we changed it to /var/empty so it was an actual directory, but nobody may write to this directory. There are plenty of ports that expect there to be a writeable home directory, and that's not an unreasonable assumption I think. Maybe MacPorts should create a temporary writeable directory (inside workpath?) before installing a port, let the port do whatever it wants with it, and clean it up afterward. MacPorts could even issue a warning or error if any files remain in this $
HO
>  ME after the destroot phase runs; it could mean the port assumed it was helping the user set something up, which of course won't work, so this would be a good indication to the maintainer of something they need to manually handle in post-activate or via some explanatory notes.

Writing to $HOME when doing 'make install' or equivalent is one thing,
and is somewhat reasonable for upstream even though we don't want it to
happen in our destroot phase.

Creating temporary files in $HOME is quite another thing and is simply
wrong. We have $TMPDIR or /tmp for that.

- Josh