I Recently re-jiggered my ~/.makepkg.conf (well, now ~/.config/pacman/makepkg.conf) to use $HOME in *DEST@instead of hard-coding /home/luke@ (since on my desktop my name is still luke, but on my new laptop, I named it lukeshu). Anyway, this broke libremakepkg, as it loads makepkg.conf with HOME=/root and LIBREHOME= your actual home. My solution was to write ${LIBREHOME:-$HOME}.

I'd given LIBRE{USER,HOME} the LIBRE prefix because I didn't want there to be any ambiguity with whether it was the "natural" home, or the "this-is-the-actual-user" home. But because it sometimes loads other config files that might reference HOME, and these files don't nescessarily have anything to do with libretools, it seems like the right thing to do might be to set HOME=$LIBREHOME (and USER=$LIBREUSER?). Or perhaps set them that way while loading config files, but not during normal execution.