Bug#688932: g_get_home_dir () should prefer ${HOME} over getpwuid ()->pw_dir

[Ivan Shmakov]

>>>>> Josselin Mouette <joss at debian.org> writes:
>>>>> Le jeudi 27 septembre 2012 à 12:59 +0700, Ivan Shmakov a écrit : 

	[Cc: debian-devel at lists.debian.org, for no good reason at all.]

 >> Currently, it's not possible for the user to specify an arbitrary
 >> home directory for most of the Glib-based packages (such as, e. g.,
 >> Gimp [3].)

 > Yes, it is.  Use G_HOME.

	Unfortunately, this variable isn't supported outside of Debian,
	and cannot be relied upon in portable scripts.

	AIUI, as long as the GNOME packages are considered, the
	XDG_CONFIG_HOME, XDG_DATA_HOME, and XDG_CACHE_HOME should be
	used instead (where supported.) [1]  That being said, there're
	also non-GNOME packages that use GLib, which may also be
	affected due to the current g_get_home_dir () behavior.

 >> I therefore suggest to change g_get_home_dir () to follow the usual
 >> Unix convention of using ${HOME} as the user's home directory,
 >> falling back to getpwuid ()->pw_dir should HOME be non-existent or
 >> empty, or, additionally, should it point to a directory not owned by
 >> the current user, or on which he or she has no executable
 >> permission, unless the current user is ‘root’ (UID 0.)

 > Certainly not.  This behavior is here for several reasons,

	I believe that they were all mentioned by now in the
	gtk-devel-list@ discussion [2] (as well as the reasons to do it
	the other way around, just as the most part of Debian currently
	does.)  Do you have anything specific to add?

	TIA.

 > and in any case we are not going to diverge from upstream by
 > introducing such fundamental API breakage.

	Also to note [1]:

--cut--
FWIW, the default values for those are supposed to be derived from $HOME
according to the XDG Basedir spec.  So if the spec is to be taken
literally it seems like we should be using $HOME instead of
g_get_home_dir ().
--cut--

	While this issue is being discussed upstream, I suggest that the
	bug remains open.

	TIA.

[1] news:506480FE.4060907 at gnome.org,
    http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnome.gtk+.devel.general/22728
[2] http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnome.gtk+.devel.general/22721

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