Re: RFC: 1.7.33 problem with user's home directory

[Jeffrey Altman <jaltman@secure-endpoints.com>]

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On 11/11/2014 4:59 AM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> Please keep in mind that I'm talking about the Cygwin home dir not as
> a default value which can be overridden in /etc/passwd, but of a Cygwin
> home dir as returned by Cygwin when fetching the passwd entry from AD,
> and no passwd file exists.  This Cygwin home dir should be:
> 
> - Make some kind of sense when using a default value.
> 
> - Be configurable by the administrators if possible.
> 
> That's why I thought it a good idea to utilize unixHomeDirectory.
> Default is /home/$USER,  The admins can set it to some other value
> in POSIX notation.

Using the unixHomeDirectory feels wrong to me because it doesn't provide
a context to indicate where the home directory is located. Its intended
purpose is to permit the specification of the home directory for UNIX
systems.  On a UNIX system it might be a local disk or /home might be on
one or more network file systems which might or might not be accessible
from a Windows system.   What would the behavior be if unixHomeDirectory was

  /afs/example.edu/users/j/e/jeff

and no AFS client was installed on the Windows system?

What would the behavior be if there was an AFS client installed on the
Windows system?   To access AFS from Windows would require UNC notation
not an absolute root.

Does a default location in the Windows profile make sense and permit
administrators to provide HKCU\SOFTWARE\Cygwin\ registry value to
indicate an alternative location?  Or perhaps a per-user environment
variable which would also be distributed via the user's registry hive.

Jeffrey Altman



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