Mount a custom home partition

[muhdsalm]

This is kinda part one in the process to support custom home partitions. This a sort of roadmap of the process:

• Implement mounting custom home partitions
• Implement decrypting encrypted home partitions
  Up till this point, to add a custom home partition you have to mess around with abroot.json and filesystem labels yourself.
• Implement adding a custom home partition in the Vanilla Installer
• Implement encrypting the home partition in the installer
• Implement adding an encrypted home partition in the installer. This could also extend to adding an encrypted var partition as well

[muhdsalm]

I really have no idea if the decryption thing works or not because I don't have any encrypted on my system. If someone does, please do let me know if it works.

[muhdsalm]

Update: works on my machine (also I finally don't have to mount my home partition by hand anymore 😁)

You can test it by using the muhdsalm/test image

[mirkobrombin]

Added a reviewer by mistake. Anyway the changes looks good for now!

[taukakao]

I'm really sorry, I see that work went into this, I just think it's way too overkill for what we're trying to do here.

In my opinion, we should just make /home a symlink to /var/home.
It's how Silverblue does it and would allow mounting something in /home (would mount to /var/home)

Also, /home doesn't need to exist before systemd so I strongly disagree with putting all the logic here.

[mirkobrombin]

That's also fair

[muhdsalm]

Maybe it's just me, but the fact that /var/home is bind mounted to /home means that a lot of configuration doesn't break if I were to install a different distro and it's expecting /var/home (which doesn't exist anymore). And keeping configuration between different systems is one of the reasons to use a custom home partition.

[taukakao]

@muhdsalm Could you elaborate? I don't understand what you mean.

If you were to switch from a different OS with a separate home partition to an ABRoot based OS you could just put the mount to /home in your fstab and systemd would automatically mount it in /var/home
Currently it's not possible since systemd doesn't overwrite the mount in /home but if it's a symlink it should work.

[muhdsalm]

@muhdsalm Could you elaborate? I don't understand what you mean.

If you were to switch from a different OS with a separate home partition to an ABRoot based OS you could just put the mount to /home in your fstab and systemd would automatically mount it in /var/home
Currently it's not possible since systemd doesn't overwrite the mount in /home but if it's a symlink it should work.

Some application configs break when switching from a system with $HOME set as /var/home to system with $HOME set to /home because they expect /var/home to still be there on the new system.

[taukakao]

With a symlink, we would still use /home for $HOME
Using a bind mount or a symlink should behave almost identically.

[muhdsalm]

With a symlink, we would still use /home for $HOME
Using a bind mount or a symlink should behave almost identically.

Oh ok, cool

[muhdsalm]

Also, /home doesn't need to exist before systemd so I strongly disagree with putting all the logic here.

Would the decryption be a reason to put the logic here?

[taukakao]

@muhdsalm
No, decryption should be handled like in other distros through fstab and crypttab in my opinion.

The only reason why we need /var this early is because it contains part of /etc

[taukakao]

Seems to me like there's no checking if the symlink exists already.
If I'm wrong and you tested this across an update and multiple reboots then you can resolve this.

[muhdsalm]

The issue with this push is that the /home cannot exist otherwise it will not create the symlink (which is expected behavior), so while testing you have to remove /home manually.

[muhdsalm]

Perhaps encryption should be handled in a different PR