From: Richard Frith-Macdonald <richard@brainstorm.co.uk>
Date: 16 August 2004 11:25:54 BST
To: Pete French <pete@twisted.org.uk>
Subject: Re: preferences api
On 16 Aug 2004, at 11:05, Pete French wrote:
Well the user associated with the daemon needs to have a home
directory.=
And if we use NSUserDefaults that means the setting for the
programs wi=
ll be placed in the users home directory. If we run my NetcconfigD
as no=
body then there must be a valid user named nobody.
Indeed - this is the crux of the issue, as the home directory
for 'nobody' is set by default to /nonexistent so the defaults system
will not work. It's not the only one either - on my system, which is
a pretty vanilla BSD install, pop, www and nobody all have a
nonexistent
home directory, as does stunnel when installed. All of those are
users that you might want to run a GNUstep based daemon as.
Unfortunately I dont have any great suggestions as to what to do when
we detetct such a sitiuation. The only one which springs to mind is
to have some location in the system root which is chmod 1777 under
which
we can create 'fake' home directories for the storage of defaults when
the real home directory does not exists. The problem there would be
that
those attributes become masked if a real home directory is created.
My preference for this situation is to enhance the system-wide
GNUsteprc
file to support explicit setting of the path to the user defaults for
specific
users.
At the moment we can force a specific path, but only for all users of a
particular installation, which is a bit ugly as it means that each of
these
users needs their own GNUSTEP_SYSTEM_ROOT environment variable
set, and their own gnustep system root directory (presumably
containing links
to the files in the 'real' gnustep system root).
So, while the current code can certainly be configured to work for any
daemon,
it's clumsy unless that daemon runs as a user with a home directory.
Having
user specific setup in the GNUsteprc would avoid that clumsiness.