It’s the only file where its path is the same as its file name, and has been the source of numerous bugs in the past… this special-case isn’t very clean, but it works.
The Vagrant tests assumed that there’d be a user called “vagrant” that would run the tests and create the files by default. Files would be owned by vagrant:vagrant by default, and this worked, until it came time to change that username. The naïve method was a search-and-replace, but this caused problems when the new user’s name wasn’t exactly the same length as the previous one.
So to fix this, we now have our own user, named after the first animal I thought of, that makes the files’ owners and groups independent of the default user of whichever VM image the xtests are running on.
Another place where it was hard-coded was the home directory, which was “/home/vagrant”, where the awkward testcases live. That last one has been changed to just “/testcases”, which has no mention of the user in it.
