[OE-core] ROOT_HOME: /home/root

[Laszlo Papp]

On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 12:52 PM, Richard Purdie
<richard.purdie at linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> On Wed, 2014-01-29 at 12:32 +0000, Laszlo Papp wrote:
>> 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.
>
> These directories can be configured by the user extremely easily.

To be fair, it would be just as extremely easy to configure it to
"/home/root" as the other way around.

> By having a default of /home/root/ we can catch software that has issues
> with relocation of that.

I am not sure what you mean. Could you please elaborate?

> Having the writeable user data in one directory like this is useful for several classes of embedded style devices.

Could you please provide any examples?

I have not seen any use cases myself out there, but after a quick poke
around, other people seem to have similar experiences around me. As
written in my initial email, I do not target "several" use cases. I am
referring to the majority which, as per Unix philosophy, I am somewhat
opinionated that is "/root".

> So to be honest I don't see a pressing reason to change this.

I do, because the earlier it is done, the fewer users that may have
incompatible changes. As the time goes ahead, more and more users will
stick to it as "default". I believe this means those who do not care
about proper Unix separation.