Bug#36151: Clearing out old policy proposals
Steve Greenland <stevegr@debian.org> wrote:
> Bug #36151: etc/init.d scripts should specify an explicit PATH
> Summary: init.d scripts shouldn't depend on having PATH set in a
> useful manner -- they should explicitly set the PATH. Not much
> discussion in the bug logs, and most of the flame^H^H^H^H^Hdiscussion
> took place on debian-devel. Result inconclusive. Last few notes
> in BTS are that it should be part of the coding guidelines, not
> policy
> Discussion: No additional comments
> Action: Retitle as "GUIDELINE" for future reminder.
This proposal is backwards. Not only should we not set PATH in /etc/init.d
scripts, we should disallow packages from doing so (except for including
extra directories). The reason is that it does away with the whole point of
the PATH variable, which is to allow the caller to override binaries.
For example, if the script didn't set PATH, I could put /usr/local/sbin in
front of it to override start-stop-daemon. This simply isn't possible if
PATH was set.
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