[hold] Propagate user.home to subprocess

[NatashaL]

When forking, the BigQuery client used by BigQueryContext looks for the local google cloud project, which is fetched following this priority of locations: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/google-cloud-java/blob/master/google-cloud-clients/google-cloud-core/src/main/java/com/google/cloud/ServiceOptions.java#L332

The last most alternative is reading from the local $HOME/.config/gcloud/ and if the preferred home folder location is not propagate properly, the subprocess ends up using the default home folder location https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/google-cloud-java/blob/master/google-cloud-clients/google-cloud-core/src/main/java/com/google/cloud/ServiceOptions.java#L370

[NatashaL]

@ulzha @zatine @labianchin @danielnorberg ptal

[labianchin]

Makes sense. This seems related to #101 . As a follow up of this PR, I wonder if we should consider passing more/all java properties to the subprocess.

[NatashaL]

Ah it seems precisely because checking $HOME is the very last step in trying to get the gcp project, it's still not enough when trying to run on a remote gcp server - it then probably gets the gcp project it's running in after all https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/google-cloud-java/blob/master/google-cloud-clients/google-cloud-core/src/main/java/com/google/cloud/ServiceOptions.java#L449

[NatashaL]

As @danielnorberg mentions here #101, maybe this should be configurable per task or per context

[danielnorberg]

I don’t understand this. Afaik java defaults the system propertyuser.home to be $HOME and no manual propagation should be necessary.

If manual propagation is indeed necessary we should have tests verifying the desired effect.

[labianchin]

I don’t understand this. Afaik java defaults the system propertyuser.home to be $HOME and no manual propagation should be necessary.

I think this might be some behavior from distroless java. From experience setting HOME env var has no effect on java user.home property.

[danielnorberg]

But we’re not setting user.home in our code. And afaik distroless doesn’t either. So still doesn’t make sense to me.

[NatashaL]

Closing this after verifying flo.forking=false doesn't change the behaviour