Many sites (i.e., ours :-) use NIS and the automounter to mount home directories on demand. However, files installed in /home become hidden when the automounter takes control of /home. RPM upgrades also fail miserably when they want to write into /home for obvious reasons. Workaround suggestions appreciated. Offensive RPMS: foreach f (i386/RedHat/RPMS/*.rpm updates/i386/RPMS/*.rpm) rpm -qlp $f | egrep '^/home/' > /dev/null && echo $f:t end anonftp-2.8-1.i386.rpm apache-1.3.6-7.i386.rpm mod_perl-1.19-2.i386.rpm samba-2.0.3-8.i386.rpm squid-2.2.STABLE1-1.i386.rpm mod_php3-3.0.9-1.i386.rpm mod_php3-manual-3.0.9-1.i386.rpm [Interesting technical quirk: replacing the above egrep with "egrep -q '^/home/' && echo $f:t" lists only anonftp, mod_perl, and mod_php3 RPMS - not the others.]
While I agree with this opinion (and always have), I'm not sure how easy it will be to move away from the /home -based locations at this point -- upgrades could be *extremely* painful. This is one we have to discuss.
As an alternative, rpm has netsharedpaths -- paths on which files will not be installed. Try echo "%_netsharedpath /home" >> /etc/rpm/macros The macro _netsharedpath takes a colon separated list of paths to ignore as values, so add to the definition as desired. You will also need to reinstall any packages that install files on netshared paths after configuring. I'm preserving this bug by resloving to the REMIND state. Caveat Emptor: It's up to you to populate netshared paths appropriately.