On 2023-11-27 07:50:40 +0900, Norbert Preining wrote: > On Sun, 26 Nov 2023, Vincent Lefevre wrote: > > Could you cite documentation saying that root must not set > > arbitrary environment variables? > > I never said that. But if they are set, root must be aware of the > consequences,
This is not documented at all. So, in doubt, root must not set *any* environment variable, except those clearly documented. Note that root may not know which packages will be installed (for instance, texlive may be brought by a dependency). So, really, any environment variable that is non standard and unrelated to the package installation system could be problematic, even though the user could have thought it would be private. > and the envvars might have effect on how packages work. Here, this is not how packages work, but how packages are installed. > > was actually there on purpose). But this could have been done > > really on purpose. And this would have broken the package > > installation. > > root can make / ro and break installation. I would expect installation to fail, not to silently yield an incorrect installation. Note that there may be reasons that / may be ro, such as disk errors at mount time. > root can set their own shell to fish with probably interesting > consequences. You could have cited zsh, which is not a POSIX shell either. AFAIK, various users use zsh as their root shell. If chsh allows non-POSIX shells to be selected, this should really be supported. -- Vincent Lefèvre <vinc...@vinc17.net> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/> 100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <https://www.vinc17.net/blog/> Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / AriC project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)