Package: sensible-utils
Version: 0.0.17+nmu1
Severity: normal
Dear Maintainer,
According to environ(7), "Any string acceptable as a command_string operand to
the sh -c command shall be valid" as a value of $EDITOR.
I take it from this that, if 'sh -c "$EDITOR <target_file>"' works, then that
is a valid value for $EDITOR.
The implication is therefore that $EDITOR may legitimately contain all sorts of
things that are not correctly supported by sensible-editor. Indeed, one could
write an entire shell script in there and call it valid; however the thing I
particularly care about right now is the ability to pass an empty argument to
my editor. I think I *should* be able to set
EDITOR='/usr/bin/emacsclient -a "" -c' and have emacsclient be passed an empty
string as its second argument; instead, it is passed the literal string "".
In a similar vein I think it should be possible to include whitespace in the
command in $EDITOR with EDITOR='"/command/with spaces"'. Once again, this
doesn't work correctly in sensible-editor.
It's worth noting that other commands which interpret $EDITOR (such as
git-commit) *do* handle these values work correctly,
I think that what needs to happen is, rather than running $EDITOR directly,
sensible-editor should do:
Run sh -c "${EDITOR:-${SELECTED_EDITOR:-editor}} $@"
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 12.10
APT prefers stable-updates
APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable-security'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Kernel: Linux 6.12.12+bpo-amd64 (SMP w/16 CPU threads; PREEMPT)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8),
LANGUAGE=en_GB:en
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled
-- no debconf information
