Re: Proposed new POSIX sh policy, version two
Mike Hommey <mh@glandium.org> writes:
> Gabor Gombas <gombasg@sztaki.hu> wrote:
>> Because it is _NOT_ a bug in bash, it is a feature. AFAIR (it was some
>> time ago I've looked at the code trying to fix this issue) bash
>> guarantees some environment variables to always exist and to have a
>> certain (initial) value, and that requires calls to the NSS functions.
>> Removing support for the affected environment variables would fix the
>> issue, but would break existing #!/bin/bash scripts depending on those
>> variables. And I'm talking about user-written scripts, not
>> Debian-provided scripts.
> One could imagine a system where the variable is filled the first time
> it is reclaimed. Most of the scripts don't, so most of the time, the nss
> functions wouldn't be called. That may complicate bash code, though.
The problem with that is that you'd have to fill in the enviromnent
variable before the first time bash forks and execs a process, since bash
has no way of knowing whether that child process is going to care about
the environment variable. Which means that in practice bash is always
going to have to fill in that information.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Reply to: