"Bastien Roucariès" <roucaries.bast...@gmail.com> writes: > 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 I think it is a fine idea to attempt to support those situations in sensible-editor and sensible-pager and document them there, but I'm not sure what Policy change you're asking for here or why this would be a matter for Policy. 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. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
