The recent work to improve "the debian package to set USER and HOME" as
mentioned in the changelog broke hudson.

All of the bugs below will be fixed if the /etc/init.d/hudson script no longer
tries to "reinvent the wheel" by setting the HOME and USER variables itself, and
instead delegates that responsibility to a working standard command such as /bin/su.

Firstly, the /etc/init.d/hudson script uses the wrong syntax. It reads "export
HOME=~$(HUDSON_USER)" but the round braces syntax means it tries to execute a
command called "HUDSON_USER" instead of substituting the value of a variable
called HUDSON_USER.

However, fixing the syntax to read "export HOME=~${HUDSON_USER}" is still
broken. This is because the HOME environment variable is supposed to contain the
already-expanded path of the home directory, i.e. "/home/hudson", and not a
shell-style pattern such as "~hudson". For example, in our installation we have
problems because Bazaar complains that it cannot find the file
"~hudson/.bazaar.log" - it does not expand that path to
"/home/hudson/.bazaar.log" because it expexts the value of $HOME to already have
been expanded.

However, all this still does not fully resolve the issues that motivated the
work on HOME and USER in /etc/init.d/hudson. That is because there are other
environment variables, such as LOGNAME and USERNAME, that are also still set
wrong. In our installation, we have USER=hudson but LOGNAME=root and
USERNAME=root, whereas LOGNAME and USERNAME should also be hudson.

The following patch against 1.321 solves all the above issues for us:
<<<
— /etc/init.d/hudson 2009-08-21 23:02:37.000000000 +0200
+++ hudson 2009-08-25 09:34:13.000000000 +0200
@@ -23,7 +23,9 @@

#DAEMON=$HUDSON_SH
DAEMON=/usr/bin/daemon
DAEMON_ARGS="-name=$NAME --inherit --env=HUDSON_HOME=$HUDSON_HOME
--output=$HUDSON_LOG --user=$HUDSON_USER --pidfile=$PIDFILE"
+DAEMON_ARGS="--name=$NAME --inherit --env=HUDSON_HOME=$HUDSON_HOME
--output=$HUDSON_LOG --pidfile=$PIDFILE"
+
+SU=/bin/su

1. Exit if the package is not installed
   [ -x "$DAEMON" ] || exit 0
   @@ -61,10 +63,9 @@
2. 2 if daemon could not be started
   $DAEMON $DAEMON_ARGS --running && return 1

• # --user in daemon doesn't prepare these environment variables, so do so now
• export HOME=~$(HUDSON_USER)
• export USER=$HUDSON_USER
• $DAEMON $DAEMON_ARGS – $JAVA $JAVA_ARGS -jar $HUDSON_WAR $HUDSON_ARGS ||
  return 2
  + # --user in daemon doesn't prepare environment variables like HOME, USER,
  LOGNAME or USERNAME,
  + # so we let su do so for us now
  + $SU $HUDSON_USER -c "$DAEMON $DAEMON_ARGS – $JAVA $JAVA_ARGS -jar
  $HUDSON_WAR $HUDSON_ARGS" || return 2
  }

#
>>>