Bug#602964: dpkg: error processing tex-common (--configure)

[Julian Gilbey <jdg@debian.org>]

On Wed, Oct 05, 2011 at 11:04:32PM +0200, Frank Küster wrote:
> Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at> wrote:
> 
> > On Mo, 26 Sep 2011, Frank Küster wrote:
> >> Funny thing, GREP_OPTIONS...
> >
> > Maybe unset GREP_OPTIONS somewhere (ucf, dpkg, ...)?
> 
> As well as SED_OPTIONS, LS_OPTIONS, AWK_OPTS, and whatever.  No, think a
> script provided for system maintenance can expect a "sane" environment.
> What sane is may be a bit unclear, but setting ouptut options for such
> tools clearly is not IMO.

System scripts should be run with sane environments if they are to
function sanely.  If you mess with the environment, you can't expect
the script to run sanely.

Root's environment should be kept basically clean, and nothing in it
should be set manually.

For my personal profile, following advice from Thomas Esser many years
ago, I do the following in my .bashrc (which gets read by scripts
before they run):

# Here go any settings which are general and can be inherited by
# scripts

umask 022
ulimit -Sc 0

# Here go settings which only apply to interactive sessions and should
# not be inherited by scripts

if [ ! -z "$PS1" ]; then
   # We're in an interactive shell
   PS1=...
   HISTSIZE=...
   shopt -s ...
   ls(){ if [ -t 1 ]; then command ls -F --color "$@";
         else command ls "$@"; fi; }
   GREP_OPTIONS=...
fi

   Julian