Re: Buster install
On Sun, Jul 14, 2019 at 09:29:55AM +0300, Andrei POPESCU wrote:
> What's the point of preserving the environment, but resetting PATH?
It assumes you trust yourself, and that you did not intentionally
sabotage your own environment.
The changes that you, the owner and administrator of your computer, have
made to your environment for your own convenience and efficiency, should
be preserved when you "su". Examples of that include user interface
customizations to the pager that you use for reading man pages, which is
something that *I* do pretty often when I'm su-ed to root. Maybe you've
memorized all of the options for a program you only use once a year.
I haven't.
Changing PATH is also for efficiency and convenience. There's a
bunch of stuff that you only use when you're root, and most of
it's in /sbin and /usr/sbin. So you only want those directories
added to your PATH when you're root. You *could* run around with
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:.... all day long, but that's slightly
less efficient when your shell has to look up a new command's location.
The implementation of su in stretch-and-earlier is the best of all worlds.
You get PATH set correctly before and after, you get to keep all of your
customized environment settings like $PAGER and $LESS, and it doesn't
change your working directory in the middle of your workflow.
What are the replacement choices?
* "su -" throws away your custom environment AND changes your working
directory.
* "sudo -i" throws away your custom environment AND changes your working
directory.
* "sudo -s" throws away most of your custom environment (unless configured
in a non-default way).
* Putting /usr/local/sbin (et al.) in your regular PATH and using "su"
lets you keep your custom environment and your working directory, at
the cost of inefficiency when you're not root. This may be extremely
difficult with some Display Managers.
* Putting ALWAYS_SET_PATH yes in /etc/login.defs lets you keep your
customized enviornment and your working directory, without imposing
an extra cost when you're not root.
Objectively, the last one is the best choice, but I have *just* enough
inertia that I don't really want to do that... so I've settled for sudo -s.
For now, anyway. I reserve the right to change my mind and do something
else if I get sufficiently annoyed.
On a purely selfish and practical note, the *main* thing that I care about
in my customized environment, when I'm root, is one environment variable:
LESS=-X. I utterly *hate* it when I read a man page, find the section I
need, get it positioned exactly right on the screen, "q" to quit, and
then... the manual vanishes from the screen. That's utterly spiteful.
I need that man page to STAY VISIBLE so I can apply the information in it
while I'm typing my next command.
It seems that inside a screen session, "man foo" acts as if I had LESS=-X
in my environment, even when I don't. So, one more reason that "sudo -s"
is acceptable to me, right now, is that I can live without that piece of
my customized environment, as long as I'm inside screen.
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