Hi Gijs Hillenius,

Thanks for your bug report. (Reply inline below.)

On Tue, Jul 31, 2018 at 09:18:06AM +0200, Gijs Hillenius wrote:
> 
> I thought I (or something) had hosed my system, but it turns out this
> change is by design. After reading more closely the changelog I read
> 
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=90483
> 
> and
> 
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=833256
> 
> > To me this mostly seems like a(nother) case of "always use 'su -',
> > never su".

Yes, the difference between 'su' and 'su -' (aka 'su -l') is to
preserve environment or not. Generally preserving the environment of
a different user when switching is a really bad idea, so basically
you always want to do 'su -'.

You are correct though that the old (src:shadow) su would, even when
preserving environment, still alter it slightly. The PATH and IFS
environment variables where apparently always alterened even
when you specified 'preserve environment'.

Since I guess the difference between using 'su' and 'su -' is something
we'll keep repeating and teaching people for all eternity the difference
in behaviour is quite user visible and unfortunate. I'll make sure to
document it in the NEWS file atleast.

(FYI 
https://salsa.debian.org/debian/util-linux/commit/ce2bd4bd05f11af1b85ce8f5c4e52807671122ed
 )

If you notice any other differences, please report back so they can
be written down as well. (Merge requests even more welcome!)

> 
> 
> Feel free to close this bug, sorry for the noise.

As a bug submitter you're fully entitled to do so yourself and as
you already seems to be aware of just sending a mail to -done is
enough.

Regards,
Andreas Henriksson

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