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


On Nov 10 20:38, Jeffrey Altman wrote:
> On 11/10/2014 3:52 PM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > 
> > after a long discussion in RL today, I came to the conclusion that
> > there's a major problem in the current handling of the user's home
> > directory in AD environments in the new user account code when not using
> > /etc/passwd files.
> 
> 
> My personal preference would be for the Cygwin Home directory to be
> created under
> 
>   %HOMEPATH%\AppData\Roaming\Cygwin
> 
> That way the home directory is isolated from native windows applications
> that might use the same file names but with different line endings
> directly in %HOMEPATH%.
> 
> And, the data is within the user profile so that when accessed via
> redirection or otherwise, the data is accessible on every machine the
> user logs into.

I don't think that works as expected in all environments.

What you refer to above is not, in fact, %HOMEPATH%\AppData\Roaming\Cygwin,
but %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Cygwin.

%USERPROFILE% and %HOMEPATH% are two different things, maintained
separately in AD.  The roaming user profile is often not the same
path as the homedir, it's just the lazy default.

The roaming user profile is loaded from the profile server every time
you log on to a machine.  If you have a big Cygwin home dir, you don't
want that to be part of your roaming profile and being loaded over the
net at login time.  

The homedir is typically on a fileserver which just gets connected to
your drive Z:.

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.


Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Maintainer                 cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat

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