On 1/9/22 10:59, Tom Lane wrote:
Given the POSIX requirements, it's basically impossible to believe
that there are interesting cases where $HOME isn't set. Thus, it
seems to me that keeping the getpwuid calls will just mean carrying
untestable dead code, so we should simplify matters by ripping
those out and *only* consulting $HOME.
While POSIX requires that the login program put you in a conforming
environment, nothing stops the user from building a non-conforming
environment, such as with ‘env -i’. One could argue that such a user
deserves whatever broken behavior they might get. But to me it seems
prudent to continue working there if it worked before.
The v1 patch also neglects the matter of documentation. I think
the simplest and most transparent thing to do is just to explicitly
mention $HOME everyplace we talk about files that are sought there,
in place of our current convention to write "~". (I'm too lazy
to go digging in the git history, but I have a feeling that this is
undoing somebody's intentional change from a long time back.)
The reason I didn’t change the documentation is that this is already
what “~” is supposed to mean according to POSIX and common
implementations. See previous discussion:
https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/1634252654444.90107%40mit.edu
https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/d452fd57-8c34-0a94-79c1-4498eb4ffbdc%40mit.edu
I consider my patch a bug fix that implements the behavior one would
already expect from the existing documentation.
Therefore, I still prefer my v1 patch on both counts. I am willing to
be overruled if you still disagree, but I wanted to explain my reasoning.
Anders
