Re: [Chicken-hackers] ep

[Peter Bex]

On Tue, Jul 09, 2013 at 12:31:54PM -0601, Alan Post wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 09, 2013 at 02:29:56PM -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> > .alyn.post. scripsit:
> > 
> > > /home would have been a safe assumption before Mac OS X, but that
> > > operating system uses /Users.  /etc/usermgmt.conf on OpenBSD defines
> > > the user base_dir (to /home), I'm not sure how this value is
> > > determined on other operating systems.
> > 
> > Eh, what of it?  It's a fallback to a fallback: no $HOME falls back to
> > getpwnam() (normally /etc/passwd but not necessarily), which then needs
> > a fallback.  Falling back to I!AM!HOMELESS would be just about as good.
> > 
> 
> how about: it looks an awful lot like success?  Should the fallback
> be obviously a fallback?

Nah, just raise an exception.  I get a little uneasy when talking about
fallbacks like "/", which seems like asking for trouble (security-wise,
but also functionality-wise; what if you want to define a user management
tool that cleans up all your dotfiles and it starts searching the entire
disk instead?  That's not even close to the intended meaning!)

Cheers,
Peter
-- 
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