Fix windows home dir implementation

[Diggsey]

Fixes #28940

r? @dtolnay

[dtolnay]

@rust-lang/libs Check out the linked issue, especially #28940 (comment) and #28940 (comment). I believe this is going to hinge on whether fixing the incorrect behavior of home_dir is an acceptable level of breakage, or whether we need to come up with a fun new name under which to expose the correct behavior.

@rfcbot fcp merge

[rfcbot]

Team member @dtolnay has proposed to merge this. The next step is review by the rest of the tagged teams:

• @BurntSushi
• @Kimundi
• @alexcrichton
• @aturon
• @dtolnay
• @sfackler

Concerns:

• cargo-rustup-breakage (Fix windows home dir implementation #46799 (comment))

Once these reviewers reach consensus, this will enter its final comment period. If you spot a major issue that hasn't been raised at any point in this process, please speak up!

See this document for info about what commands tagged team members can give me.

[BurntSushi]

Could someone explain the interaction with cygwin in more detail here? My reading of this comment seems to suggest that this might change the behavior of command line tools that are built to run in either cygwin or cmd on Windows. For example, is it possible that such command line tools might accidentally do the right thing for cygwin users today?

[Diggsey]

Cygwin emulates a linux distribution on windows: the cygwin target is therefore a linux target and code compiled for that target should not use this code-path (or any cfg(windows) code really). This is different from the -gnu target which is a windows target, it's just that the mingw toolchain is often run under cygwin.

As with any change in behaviour, it's possible that this is accidentally working for someone right now, but on the other hand there are definitely applications currently using home_dir() which are accidentally broken when run from a cygwin/msys terminal. (Rustup has an entire utils module dedicated to re-implementing standard library functions which do not work optimally on windows, home_dir included)

[alexcrichton]

I believe the main pushback on this issue was indeed the breaking changes that would come about with a change like this. For example Cargo and Rustup may be likely to break as tools which heavily use the home directory for caching and such. I'm not sure how many other tools rely on something like this.

Cargo now depends on a crate called home so the logic isn't in precisely Cargo, but I believe this is a breaking change for much of Cargo/rustup behavior:

• The definition of home_dir in the home crate is different than the one proposed here.
• Similarly the definition of home_dir in rustup is different.
• The implementation of cargo_home_with_cwd uses the old std::env function to find historical homes of Cargo to avoid moving the directory too much.
• Similarly rustup does the same thing

I believe that rustup/Cargo are both intended to not use $HOME by default on Windows and instead prefer the "real home dir" for fresh installs and such. Despite that though I think this change would still be a breaking change for these tools as they're explicitly attempting to be backwards compatible.

I'm not entirely sure how to guage the expected breakage across the rest of the ecosystem. It may be best to have a better story for this breakage, for example "use this crate for the old behavior" or something like that would be a great way to help mitigate the breakage. (aka the thing that cargo/rustup will transition to using). If we can get our ducks in a row via something like that I'd be ok landing this.

[alexcrichton]

@rfcbot concern cargo-rustup-breakage

(see previous comment)

[Diggsey]

@alexcrichton There's no way this change can break cargo or rustup, since as you pointed out, they don't call this function?

The good thing is that with this change, the unsafe code in those tools could be removed:
env::var("USERPROFILE").unwrap_or_else(env::home_dir)

[alexcrichton]

@Diggsey as I pointed out here and here both tools in fact call std::env::home_dir, and the functionality they use that for would break.

[BurntSushi]

Cygwin emulates a linux distribution on windows: the cygwin target is therefore a linux target and code compiled for that target should not use this code-path (or any cfg(windows) code really)

I think this would be my concern then. Right now I distribute a single binary that is intended to work well in both cygwin and cmd. Perhaps this is "wrong," but having two different bins for cygwin and cmd would be quite user hostile IMO. Anyway, I don't want to debate that aspect too much, but would rather just say that this is a source of potential breakage.

[petrochenkov]

I'm not even sure there's a single correct home directory under MSYS.

"Globally installed" programs like rustc/cargo from rustup that just happen to be called from MSYS shell (but can be run outside of it) should still use the "global" home directory, i.e. the Windows one.

If something is supposed to be installed locally into the MSYS's little Unix filesystem emulation, then it should use /home directory inside of it and may break if run from outside of MSYS.

The way of treating and prioritizing home directories seems to be largely application-dependent.

[aturon]

Sorry for the long delay on this!

The libs team discussed this API in our previous meeting. While it seems good to pursue this change, we are wary of changing the behavior of stable APIs, and instead would like to propose the following:

• Experiment with an improved API in an external crate, perhaps the home crate.
• Potentially add other useful, related APIs to that crate.
• Eventually, deprecate the std APIs, either pointing to the external crate, or by pulling in the new APIs to std

How does that sound?

[Diggsey]

@aturon the home crate already implements the breaking part of this change (not looking at %HOME% on windows) and that's its entire reason for being. What is left to experiment with?

[kennytm]

Triage ping @rust-lang/libs, given the comment in #46799 (comment) I suppose the FCP should be canceled?

@Diggsey as you mentioned first step is already done in the home package, what about we just perform the rest by repurposing this PR (if we want to keep it open)?

• deprecate std::env::home_dir, and/or
• introduce a new function e.g. std::env::home_path which does the correct thing

[Zoxc]

I don't think there should be a function to get this directory on Windows. Typical applications should not be accessing it. Having it in the standard library makes it too convenient to do so.

[dtolnay]

@rfcbot fcp cancel

Echoing #46799 (comment) -- breaking a stable API this way is not going to work even if the current behavior is allegedly never what someone should want. Let's work on figuring out a better API in an external crate. The home crate (which currently implements home_dir() on Windows not the way this PR does, because it considers %USERPROFILE%) would be a good place to try to get this right, and less disruptive than iterating on this in the standard library.

As a first step I would recommend cataloguing as many use cases as possible among the crates that currently call home::home_dir or env::home_dir. From those we can see if there is a pattern of why they need to know the home dir. Are they trying to figure out where to save a downloaded file? Are they writing a dotfile? Are they implementing a cache? All of those are more cross-platform concepts than the concept of a "home dir" so it may make sense to serve such use cases individually, in line with what the home crate is already doing with cargo_home and rustup_home.

[rfcbot]

@dtolnay proposal cancelled.

[brson]

I know this is an ancient thread but @alexcrichton the functionality you are pointing to in home is pretty much on its way out with rust-lang/cargo#5183 - that PR doesn't acknowledge that hack at all - and it's a pretty old hack.

[brson]

The actual 'home' definitions are legit, whereas the definitions in directories are MPL2.