[OE-core] ROOT_HOME: /home/root

[Laszlo Papp]

Hi,

Is there any obstacle why this cannot be /root as per default Unix
philosophy [1]?

It is not an unusual that the /home partition is a separate, and the
sysadmins would like to manage the core system without getting that
partition mounted, etc.

It is true that it would be possible to work that around, but /root as
a default just feels so much more natural on a Unix system.

What I currently see after talking to a few people, the people keep
changing it in their layer (distribution) config. It looks sub-optimal
at first, but perhaps there are still valid reasons to keep this
around?

I was told on IRC the first embedded debian may have done it to keep
rootfs read-only. First, you can remount the root partition on jffs2,
ubifs, etc... as R/W.

Even if you could not, you can have a separate /root partition which
is a good idea anyway to keep the super-user separate from the
"regular" users. If that is not OK, there is still the option for the
minority to override it to /home/root if really needed, but I
personally do not think it should be...

So, all in all, I am in favor of changing this back to /root to be
more linux-y and well-separated from the normal users.

Unfortunately, it would lead to some breakages out there when they
update Yocto, so it may not be acceptable in this project. I do not
know the rules. The migration could be aided though with some proper
documentation.

Cheers, L.

[1] FHS 2.3 still says  /root : Home directory for the root user (optional)