On Sat, May 10, 2014 at 03:38:24PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote:
> As the maintainer of the pam package in Debian, I assure you: this is a bug
> in dirmngr. System services should not (must not) call interfaces that
> launch pam sessions as part of their init scripts. su is one of those
> interfaces.
I trust you to be technically right on this. Still the number of
packages getting this wrong is stunning[1]. Therefore I'd argue that
this is not solely a problem to be solved in individual packages.
It is not the first time we are facing this kind of breakage. A very
similar case recently happened when shells of system users were switched
to nologin. It broke quite a few packages, still that change was
accomplished and the offending packages (at least most of them) were
fixed.
Can we please have a MBF on this issue, fix the packages and have
systemd gain Breaks for all the packages it highlights this bug on? And
until systemd has the relevant Breaks, it should have a
transition-blocker RC bug. We do have procedures for these kinds of
things.
Thanks
Helmut
[1] http://codesearch.debian.net/search?q=su+-c+path%3Adebian%2F+path%3Ainit
Apparently the query misses more results such as
http://sources.debian.net/src/ejabberd/2.1.11-1/debian/init.d
http://sources.debian.net/src/fetchmail/6.3.26-1/debian/init
http://sources.debian.net/src/nvi/1.81.6-11/debian/init
Very likely there is more.