Comment 5 for bug 1181157

That sounds a bit weird to me... os.expanduser(~) should run OK within the python interpreter even if the env is not passed by your startproc. The problem seems to be that the environment is still passed, but with wrong values.

It may break you elsewhere (as we use os.expanduser elsewhere). Other distros say they are unaffected...

If you can't workaround it in packaging (by using a daemonizer that sets $HOME or resets the environment completely, by setting $HOME explicitly in your startproc call, or by explicitely setting signing_dir to something meaningful) I guess we could switch to using a tempfile.mkdtemp temporary directory...