Re: [Chicken-hackers] ep

[.alyn.post.]

On Tue, Jul 09, 2013 at 08:37:18PM +0200, Peter Bex wrote:
> 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!)
> 

An exception certainly works for me.

-Alan
-- 
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