Bug#524413: fails with xorg 7.4

[<olafBuddenhagen@gmx.net>]

Package: xauth
Version: 1:1.0.3-2
Severity: normal


I also got hit by this issue, after the big X upgrade in testing.
After a day or so I managed to track it down. The problem is a bogus
/etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc, in conjuction with a behaviour change in the
new X server.

When xinit is invoked with a "server" argument (which defaults to
/etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc when using startx), it will pass the other
server arguments (display and options) to this "server" program. In our
case, "server" is the xserverrc script. It launches the actual X server,
and it should pass on the arguments -- but the default Debian xserverrc
never did that!

The result is that the "-auth" option created by startx isn't actually
passed to the X server. No wonder authentication doesn't work!

However, startx also exports the $XAUTHORITY variable, and the server
used to honour this. So while it never used the dedicated .serverauth
that was meant to be passed with -auth, it used the client authority
file (~/.Xauthority) named in $XAUTHORITY instead -- which happens to
work too...

The new server however doesn't honour $XAUTHORITY anymore, and thus the
bug is no longer covered up. The xserverrc needs to be fixed.

This can easily be confirmed by trying a simple workaround:

   echo 'exec X $*' >~/.xserverrc

and everything works fine...

Note that this is not really an xauth bug. (The xauth program only
manages the files, but isn't involved in the actual authentication.) It
should be assigned to xinit I believe, which owns the bogus default
/etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc. I don't want to muck around with the BTS
though, so I'll leave the reassigning to more qualified people :-)

-- System Information:
Debian Release: squeeze/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.23
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=de_DE (charmap=ISO-8859-1)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages xauth depends on:
ii  libc6                         2.9-25     GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libx11-6                      2:1.2.2-1  X11 client-side library
ii  libxau6                       1:1.0.4-2  X11 authorisation library
ii  libxext6                      2:1.0.4-1  X11 miscellaneous extension librar
ii  libxmuu1                      2:1.0.4-2  X11 miscellaneous micro-utility li
ii  x11-common                    1:7.4+4    X Window System (X.Org) infrastruc

xauth recommends no packages.

xauth suggests no packages.

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