Bug#909395: upgrade-reports: missing sbin in root path

[Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net>]

Control: tags -1 moreinfo

Jeff Cliff:
> Package: upgrade-reports
> Severity: important
> 
> Dear Maintainer,
> 
> Not really sure where to submit this but upgrading to buster via instructions at
> https://wiki.debian.org/DebianTesting
> resulted in a system that would boot fine, but when i went back in to aptitude afterwards I noticed
> /sbin (and its subdirectories, eg /usr/local/sbin:/usr/sbin:/sbin ) was not in root's path.  This meant 
> if I used 'su' to log in to root, to install/upgrade/whathaveyou ...ldconfig, 'shutdown' among other 
> things was not in the path.
> 
> I've now upgraded 2 systems from stable to buster and both did the same thing.
> 
> adding 
> 
> PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/sbin:/sbin
> 
> to .bashrc for root (which was empty) made at least installing/upgrading via aptitude work...but there
> wasn't much indication that I had to do this anywhere.  
> 
> If this is something new that we have to do for buster, it should be in the instructions
> 
> [...]
Hi Jeff,

Are you perhaps using "su" (instead of "su -") when changing to root?
If so, then there is a Stretch -> Buster specific change specifically
for "su" about that in util-linux's NEWS file.  It will probably be
written in the release-notes for buster (once we start writing those for
buster).

I can recommend using "apt-listchanges", which will show the NEWS files
of packages on upgrades.

Thanks,
~Niels