On Sun, 3 May 2020 at 16:17, Samuel Sieb <samuel@sieb.net> wrote:
On 5/3/20 6:37 AM, Sam Varshavchik wrote:
> Especially since there's plenty of stuff outside of your home directory
> that's tied to your userid and groupid.
>
> /var/spool/mail, for example.

What is this plenty of stuff?  That's one example.  What else?

TeX Live (the official CTAN version): the defacto standard location is /
usr/local/texlive.  Recommended practice is to have a TeX Live administrator 
who has write access for the texlive directory and is responsible for installing 
updates and managing configurations. 

One way is to create a "<package name>"  user and give the package 
administrator rights via a sudo mechanism to run jobs as that user, 
but this will need a new implementation.

There are many examples of large scientific packages where a similar
approach is used.   Many of the installation and updating tools for these 
packages are not robust and can't be trusted not to cause damage when run 
with excessive privileges.  Such packages are constantly being modified to 
handle new data sets or improved algorithms, so users are very much
hands on.


> Oh, we're not supposed read mail any more, on Linux? We're supposed to
> use Gmail, or something?

Mail delivery to there is an unusual situation.  How many people have a
mail server running on their local system that puts the result in
/var/spool/mail?  I use postfix and all my mail is delivered to a
Maildir in my home directory.  But that's on the server anyway and I use
an IMAP client to connect to dovecot to get it.  I don't have any user
files outside of my home on either the server or my local computers.

Homed, like systemd, addresses issues facing large organizations. 
These days, all email in many enterprises has to be archived outside 
the control of the sender or recipient (in case of FOI requests for 
government, lawsuits for businesses, HR investigations, death of a 
salesman, etc.).  

--
George N. White III