FreeBSD user home directory

[Glen Barber]

On Wed, Jul 20, 2016 at 07:54:27PM -0700, Mark Millard wrote:
> 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.
> 

Right, but as we do not provide binary upgrade paths for tier-2
architectures, nothing should be affected for source-based upgrades.
Especially in this case.

> 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?)
> 

This is discussion that is not applicable for the commit to which you
reference.  It creates a symlink on an image that is "installed" by
writing a raw filesystem onto an SD card via dd(1).  This does not
affect source-based upgrades.

Glen

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