On 9/10/19 4:25 PM, Rolf Eike Beer wrote: > > I'm not entirely sure. It's what qmail always has done and what the eclass > also did. >
This is suggested by the qmail documentation, http://lifewithqmail.org/lwq.html#create-users ...but goes back to at least 1998, and likely earlier. I grepped the source and don't see any obvious uses of $HOME. It was probably suggested by DJB simply because it's a directory, and guaranteed to exist on the various platforms that qmail supported at the time. It would be best if someone who runs qmail could change them all to /dev/null and see if anything breaks. The home directory is already unwritable, and none of the users have shells, so I'm optimistic. At present, the following code is repeated six times, ACCT_USER_HOME=/var/qmail ACCT_USER_HOME_OWNER=root:qmail ACCT_USER_HOME_PERMS=0755 ACCT_USER_GROUPS=( nofiles ) and you have to keep them in sync for eternity. It would be less error-prone if you could create that directory (and /var/qmail/alias) only once, in the qmail ebuild, since that's the package that uses those directories.
