[ANNOUNCEMENT] TEST RELEASE: Cygwin 1.7.34-003 (Christmas/New Year release)

[Achim Gratz]

Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin <at> cygwin.com> writes:
> No.  How often do you change such a central setting as the db_home
> setting for all users?

Almost never.  But testing gets more involved in this way.

> I thought it's clear how Cygwin does it.  Here it is:
> 
>   Is homeDrive non-empty?
>     If yes, convert to POSIX and use as $HOME.
>     If not, is homeDirectory non-empty? 
>       If yes, convert to POSIX and use as $HOME.
>       If no, ask the local computer for the user's profile directory.
>         If it has one, convert to POSIX and use as home dir
>         If not, fallback to /home/$USER.

I'd still want something else: automount /home/<user> to the appropriate
directory.  But, as said before, that won't work through nsswitch.conf or at
least doesn't really belong there.

> ...which you can change in /etc/fstab.

...which has other problems for the rest of the mapped drives.  I still
think the home directory should be treated separately.

> Right, but there's nothing Cygwin can do about it.  It means, you can't
> use this db_home setting if you use ssh sessions, or you use password
> authentication (real, or via passwd -R) and mount the drive in a profile.

Would it be possible to give the homeDirectory preference over homeDrive? 
This order would be more useful for Cygwin since Cygwin doesn't map the
drive when the user logs in.
 
> Btw., what about my TMP/TEMP question?

I think at least sshd should treat these like PATH: provide a sane default
and ignore any existing settings.  I'm not sure in which other contexts this
situation can occur, but if the Windows settings are used the path must be
converted to POSIX.  I personally think that Cygwin has no business putting
files into Windows TMP/TEMP since in almost all cases the ACL will be set in
ways that either make it insecure or difficult for non-ACL-aware programs to
correctly deal with it.


Regards,
Achim.


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