Snaps: a failed experiment

[Smoot Carl-Mitchell]

On Tue, 2025-09-23 at 16:48 +0000, Jeffery Small wrote:
> 
> Another Firefox snap problem I ran into a long long time ago was that
> if
> you don't have your $HOME directly under /home then it simply would
> not
> work.  I've since seen comments that they fixed something that
> allowed
> $HOME to be deeper than the top layer, but as far as I know they
> never
> fixed the problem if your home directory was elsewhere completely. 
> I've
> had my home directories under /u for over 50 years, long before /home
> was
> even a thought in someone's mind, and I'm not going to change it just
> to
> accommodate idiot programming that has little respect for the UNIX
> design
> philosophy.  This was the issue that caused me to reject the snap
> model.

$HOME is a POSIX standard these days. I am surprised the developers
would not lookup the home directory using getpwnam() which is a C
library standard on POSIX systems. The home directory for any user can
be anywhere in the filesystem hierarchy. /home is the most common
location, however.
-- 
Smoot Carl-Mitchell
System/Network Architect
voice: +1 480 922-7313
cell: +1 602 421-9005
smoot at tic.com