I recall having to do some funny interesting things without skel in NixOS

• nixpkgs/pkgs/desktops/pantheon/desktop/elementary-session-settings/default.nix

  Line 28 in 595f379

  # Upstream relies on /etc/skel to initiate a new users home directory with plank's dockitems.

But I'm not sure how I feel about it being here. I don't see much of managing anything in the users homedir in NixOS. I'm wondering why it was never included in the first place.

I'm wondering why it was never included in the first place.

The other PR #41858 was rejected because nixOS shouldn't manage the homedir.

Note that the backbone of the idea for that PR was what home-manager does today.

This PR is entirely different and adds a way to initialize the homedir once and then leave it be, so no managing, making it more similar to services.postgresql.initialScript

cc @grahamc who has opinions on this sort of thing

Would it be possible to get this to use /etc/skel? For instance, I might have some configuration like:

environment.etc."skel/.bashrc".text = ''
  export NIX_PATH="..."
'';

And would like it to work equally well with "immutableUsers" and useradd and pam_mkhomedir.

@matthewbauer Yes, the trouble is just resolving the links and then copying just the contents (does cp have an option for that?). Would it be enough to just use /etc/skel or do I need to reference the actual store path?

@matthewbauer I've implemented it to use /etc/skel now (from system.build.etc)

Everything else seems fine to me.

Why do we need /etc/skel? We could also just specify a directory in the Nix store to use as a skeleton. The use of /etc should generally be avoided for configuration files/data that are internal to one program (in this case, update-users-groups.pl). Also, using a global directory like /etc/skel precludes having different skeletons for different users, which could be avoided if we had an option like users.users.*.skeleton = ... derivation that creates some files ....

BTW uncommon abbreviations like "skel" should be avoided in favour of "skeleton" or "template" or whatever.

Why do we need /etc/skel? We could also just specify a directory in the Nix store to use as a skeleton.

I think it would be a good idea to have an improved feature, but I think the scope of the PR was to be /etc/skel support in NixOS.

BTW uncommon abbreviations like "skel" should be avoided in favour of "skeleton" or "template" or whatever.

I think the abbreviation is what it's widely referred to http://www.linfo.org/etc_skel.html.
Though I could agree that copySkel doesn't really stick out to what this thing does. And it still gets implicitly enabled with createHome.

I think it would be a good idea to have an improved feature, but I think the scope of the PR was to be /etc/skel support in NixOS.

I don't think we need /etc/skel support in NixOS. Rather, what we want is a way to initialize home directories. But we don't have to copy the non-declarative mechanisms of other Linux distributions for that.

I think it would be a good idea to have an improved feature, but I think the scope of the PR was to be /etc/skel support in NixOS.

I don't think we need /etc/skel support in NixOS. Rather, what we want is a way to initialize home directories. But we don't have to copy the non-declarative mechanisms of other Linux distributions for that.

I see, I think that sounds reasonable. And your edit for a per-user option intrigues me.

@edolstra I believe the scope of your request is to make it more declarative, but still just for initialization of a user's home directory with createHome? I'm mentioning this because I remembered home-manager's home.file https://github.com/rycee/home-manager/blob/master/modules/files.nix.

@edolstra After a talk with @worldofpeace we realized #41858 seems more like you want this PR to be. But there's already home-manager's home.file and /etc/skel is just a simple standard, if users need more I feel like they're really better off just switching to home-manager.

What do you think?

Yeah, #41858 (or home-manager) seems like a better fit. The issue with /etc/skel is that it's the sort of standard that we don't really want to follow in NixOS because it's not very declarative (e.g. if users modify it outside of their NixOS configuration). Having said that, any option specifying the initial contents of a stateful entity is inherently a non-congruent form of configuration management, so it doesn't really matter that much...

It may be worth mentioning that the following actually works :

users.users.<user>.createHome = false;
security.pam.services.login.makeHomeDir = true;
security.pam.services.sddm.makeHomeDir = true;
security.pam.makeHomeDir.skelDirectory = "${./user-skeleton}";

This enables users to create NixOS live media without a /etc/skel directory.

Don't see any chance of this getting merged, so see ya downstream fellas