Your message dated Sat, 09 Sep 2023 21:28:34 -0700
with message-id <87jzsyzm6l....@hope.eyrie.org>
and subject line Re: Bug#991984: Please document minimal environment variable
needed for sensible-utils
has caused the Debian Bug report #991984,
regarding Please document minimal environment variable needed for sensible-utils
to be marked as done.
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991984: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=991984
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--- Begin Message ---
Package: debian-policy
Version: 4.5.1.0
Severity: important
Control: block 991982 by -1
Control: block 987675 by -1
Dear Maintainer,
For now $env -i sensible-utils, fail due to $HOME and $TERM not set.
I am for now working around HOME not set in sensible-utils core, but posix [1]
documentation does not document really the value that should be set for a
correct behavior of program.
Nevertheless:
- we should expect that PATH is set to a sensible value (note that it depends
of the shell), but nevertheless not setting PATH is not really safe
- HOME may not be set. If set the value may be incorrect (su -)
- TERM may not be set. If set the value may not be correct
- USER may not be set. If set the value may be incorrect (su -)
So I will like to have a footnote saying that sensible-pager/sensible-editor
etc, should test if they work under env -i, and if they do not work fallback to
return 126 (according to shell documentation Command invoked cannot execute),
thus allowing sensible-utils to fallback to vi that is safe and tested under
env -i
Bastien
[1] https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/
--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message ---
Russ Allbery <r...@debian.org> writes:
> Policy does not mandate any specific behavior for sensible-editor and
> sensible-pager other than that they will implement the EDITOR and PAGER
> environment variable checking for you. I think that's best left to the
> maintainer of those programs to decide.
> We also don't expect that the editor or pager invoked following the
> rules in Policy 11.4 (and, by extension, sensible-editor and
> sensible-pager themselves) will work in unusual situations, such as ones
> without standard environment variables set. We can't: the user is free
> to set EDITOR and PAGER to anything they chose, including programs not
> in Debian. So you can't really expect any particular behavior from
> whatever EDITOR or PAGER is set to. Maybe it will fail with a helpful
> error code, maybe it will start and not work but not exit, maybe
> something else entirely will happen. This is really outside of our
> control.
There was no further discussion of this over the past year, so I'm going
to go ahead and close this bug with the above comment.
--
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
--- End Message ---
