Hello Andreas Henriksson, I'm a bit puzzled by your e-mail. Simon asked me to provide some text, Chris prodded me and Davide and Simon reviewed my text (which does not imply that it is perfect or so).
On Sun, Aug 12, 2018 at 05:56:14AM +0200, Andreas Henriksson wrote:
> Hello Helge Kreutzmann,
>
> I'm skeptical how relevant it is to document how X and ssh works
> in the _su_ manpage, but either way since you're patching the
I'm fine to skip the X and ssh part, but as stated above the reviewer
liked the idea and I actually tried to keep it short and simple. And
no, I don't intend to go into any more details, which would be way
over top in the su manpage.
> manpage this is something you want to send upstream for review if
> you think it's worth persuing and my opinion doesn't count there.
Well, I think for _Debian_ users the change *is* suprising, but only
because the su version (and its configuration / behaviour) has
changed. For upstream util-linux this is not the case, there no change
has occured, only one more distribution is now using the su
implementation.
So I could very well understand if util-linux upstream would reject
the change, as there nothing has happend (and why should users of
other distributions care about a Debian specific issue?).
> As always to increase chances of a favourable review getting the
> administrative details right from the start is useful, so please
> see Documentation/howto-contribute.txt
As you can see from the bug log, there already was some review.
Looking at howto-contribute.txt, it also says:
* neutrality: the files in util-linux should be distribution-neutral.
Which is clearly not the case here. So upstreaming is no option.
> (You might also want to replace references to 'Debian 9' with
> 'shadow su implementation' or similar.)
I think the explicit reference to Debian serves a purpose here: The
user might not know that previous versions of su came from shadow, and
current ones from util-linux. They just see their workflow break.
> I'll add a note to util-linux.NEWS about DISPLAY and XAUTHORITY.
Thanks. But as stated earlier, having it in NEWS is only part of the
solution, because in larger installations NEWS are not seen by
ordinary users, e.g at work I've never seen any NEWS file, I simply
was informed than an upgrade had happened, so I rely on other
information sources, where man pages are my first try. (And search in
the web and hopefully finding bug reports like this are really
disliked last options.)
So I would ask you to carry a patch simliar to the one proposed (maybe
stripped, if you don't like the part about better solutions, security
wise) until the next Debian version is released and then drop it
again, so people on the next stable version can read it in the man
page.
If you agree I'm fine to further tune the patch.
Greetings
Helge
--
Dr. Helge Kreutzmann deb...@helgefjell.de
Dipl.-Phys. http://www.helgefjell.de/debian.php
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