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

[Simon Glass]

Hi Tom,

On Thu, 16 Feb 2023 at 17:19, Tom Rini <trini at konsulko.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Feb 16, 2023 at 05:12:33PM -0700, Simon Glass wrote:
> > 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.
>
> We should document that it's where we're putting stuff, not so much
> "tell" them, unless you mean as a note when downloading.  But yes,
> ~/.binman-tools sounds reasonable.  Maybe a flag to point elsewhere?

OK I will take a look.

Regards,
Simon