bug 58002

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Fri, Sep 08, 2006 at 09:30:48PM -0500, Rocco Stanzione wrote:
> On Friday 08 September 2006 6:14 pm, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> > On Tue, Aug 29, 2006 at 04:45:44PM -0500, Rocco Stanzione wrote:
> [snip]
> > > My recommendation (hadn't thought of it by the time I decided to wash my
> > > hands of the launchpad bug) is to put an empty /etc/skel/.viminfo into
> > > the vim package, which would fix this and have no other consequences that
> > > I can think of.  Modifying sudoers to always set home was also suggested,
> > > but I think that would have some unintended consequences.  I figure the
> > > answer to that will determine which package, if any, this bug should be
> > > filed against.
> >
> > This is a workaround, not a fix, and one which I'm not sure is worth the
> > tradeoff.  The underlying issue needs to be addressed with a globally
> > consistent policy.  I've adjusted the description of the bug accordingly,
> > and encourage the QA team to mark similar bugs as duplicates of that one,
> > since it needs a general solution.
> 
> What is traded off?  I don't see a cost or risk involved with putting an 
> empty /etc/skel/.viminfo in the vim package.

There is a non-obvious cost in maintainability and complexity here.  Adding
new things to /etc/skel in the distribution causes unexpected effects for
system administrators.  New users get this file, old users don't, and they
get different behaviour.  The set of packages currently installed changes
the initial set of files for users created at that point in time.  The
system should behave more consistently and predictably.

/etc/skel should be entirely for example purposes, and designed to be
customized by the system administrator, not to hack around bugs in the
OS.

> > My gut feeling is that we probably want to adjust some of the default
> > environment variable settings and sudo's list of preserved variables, to
> > preserve the convenience provided by the current setup, and then switch to
> > always_set_home. I think this needs serious thought and discussion before
> > we agree on a solution, however.
> 
> I'd be very hesitant to change the behavior of sudo - it's behaved that way 
> for a long time, and I for one have scripts and habits that depend on $HOME 
> being preserved when I run sudo without -H.

Such a policy change requires proper consideration and discussion, but my
instinct would be to only change it for new installations anyway.

-- 
 - mdz