FreeBSD user home directory

[Mark Millard]

Looking at my armv6 and amd64 11.0's (long in use, originally -CURRENT, now -STABLE, maintained via source updates):

amd64 and armv6 (rpi2) both have real /usr/home directories.

armv6 (and rpi2) has no /home path established at all, not even as a symbolic link to elsewhere.

amd64 has /home -> usr/home via a symbolic link.

(I do not have access to check my memory and will not for weeks but if I remember right my powerpc64 and powerpc 11.0's were like amd64 above. They dated back to somewhat before 2016-June-04 when last updated.)

If I remember right my old powerpc and powerpc 10.x-STABLE's and 10.x-RELEASES also agreed with amd64 above. (At the time I only was experimenting with powerpc64 and powerpc FreeBSD.)

In comparison today's -r303119 says:

> Log:
>   Create a /usr/home -> /home symlink for the arm images to
>   avoid /usr/home confusingly being created as a directory.


May be which path is to directly be the actual directory by default has changed --since all of my contexts started long ago.

But what all my confirmable examples suggest is that /usr/home is normally the directory.

I did not manually control or create /usr/home for any of the contexts as far as I can remember. It was automatic as a side effect of some activity.

If there is variability up to now or across architectures it might be appropriate to have an UPDATING entry to indicate the new uniform answer or whatever describes how things now are.

Are there alternative standard FreeBSD installation techniques that may be should all be made to match for such properties? (POLA for such defaults: lack of variability across [the major or official] techniques?)

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Mark Millard
markmi at dsl-only.net