[PATCH] binman: Avoid requiring a home directory on startup

[Simon Glass]

Hi Tom,

On Tue, 14 Feb 2023 at 13:27, Tom Rini <trini at konsulko.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Feb 14, 2023 at 03:12:46PM -0500, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> > On Tue, Feb 14, 2023 at 3:08 PM Tom Rini <trini at konsulko.com> wrote:
> > > Downloading things from the internet and putting them in to the default
> > > PATH always and forever is also kinda not great?
> >
> > you just described a standard distribution.  this is like literally
> > how all of them work.  not to mention every other language-specific
> > distro tool out there (e.g. Python pip, Perl cpan, Go, etc...).
> >
> > maybe you'd like more guarantees on top (e.g. signature verification)
> > which is reasonable.
> >
> > but to be clear, this script is already merged & in the tree, so your
> > feedback doesn't block this patch.
>
> Yes, exactly. This is a fix on top of what we do today, so it should go
> in. But modern distributions only install signed packages, and
> language-specific tools tend to be a hive of bad examples. Looking over
> binman right now, I see that we're either using apt (and oh, there's
> "aot" typo in one spot) or downloading from a known Google drive, for
> only a few less common tools.
>
> So yes, I would like to see some ideas on how to improve things in the
> future so we aren't putting the binaries somewhere that's not a default
> (or frequently common) PATH location.

Are you thinking they should go in ~/.binman-tools or something like
that? Then we would need to tell people to add it to their path. But
we could make binman look there automatically.

Regards,
Simon