Changing HOME ENV-Variable

[Harvey]

Hello all,

in our systems created with buildroot the ENV-Variable HOME for user
root is /:

# env
USER=root
HOME=/

This leads to files and directories that are normally located in /root
to be located in the root directory:

# ls -la
drwxr-xr-x   22 root     root           500 Mar 24 19:54 .
drwxr-xr-x   22 root     root           500 Mar 24 19:54 ..
-rw-------    1 root     root           502 Mar 25 11:34 .ash_history
drwx------    3 root     root            60 Mar 24 19:54 .cache
drwx------    3 root     root            60 Mar 24 19:54 .config
drwx------    3 root     root            60 Mar 24 19:54 .local
-r-xr-xr-x    1 root     root           888 Mar 24 19:52 .profile
drwxr-xr-x    2 root     root            60 Mar 24 19:52 .ssh
drwxr-xr-x    2 root     root          1280 Mar 24 19:53 bin
drwx------    3 root     root         16384 Jan  1  1970 boot
drwxr-xr-x    5 root     root          4096 Feb 12  2019 data
drwxr-xr-x    8 root     root          2560 Mar 24 19:52 dev
drwxr-xr-x   27 root     root          1340 Mar 24 19:53 etc
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root            12 Mar 24 19:50 init ->
/bin/busybox
drwxr-xr-x    3 root     root           460 Mar 24 19:52 lib
drwxr-xr-x    2 root     root            40 Mar 24 19:50 mnt
dr-xr-xr-x  181 root     root             0 Mar 24 19:52 proc
drwx------    2 root     root            40 Mar  5 13:00 root
drwxrwxrwt   18 root     root          1460 Mar 24 19:53 run
drwxr-xr-x    2 root     root          1020 Mar 24 19:52 sbin
drwxr-xr-x    3 root     root            60 Mar 24 19:50 srv
dr-xr-xr-x   13 root     root             0 Mar 24 19:52 sys
drwxrwxrwt    3 root     root           100 Mar 25 11:30 tmp
drwxr-xr-x    8 root     root           160 Mar 24 19:52 usr
drwxr-xr-x    9 root     root           220 Mar 24 19:53 var

I have looked around busbox (and buildroot) configuration but did not
find a setting to change this. What did I overlook?

Greetings
Harvey