It looks like that's been fixed in more recent versions of chef-client, but this will likely break in Chef 13, so this fixes issues with any recent versions of chef-client with this problem as well as problems that will likely happen with this specific code when Chef 13 comes out.
It looks like chef-client 12.14.x+ broke this way that
manage_homeused to work (see https://github.com/chef/chef/issues/5318).It looks like that's been fixed in more recent versions of chef-client, but this will likely break in Chef 13, so this fixes issues with any recent versions of chef-client with this problem as well as problems that will likely happen with this specific code when Chef 13 comes out.