Bug#634246: apt: PATH not propagated down to maintainer scripts
Package: apt
Version: 0.8.14.1
Severity: normal
I have a handful of scripts in /usr/local/sbin that I supposed would
override system programs of the same name, and would get picked to run
from maintainer scripts in preference to the system ones because
/usr/local/sbin is first in root's PATH. The programs thus fooled are
of the adduser variety.
That never worked as I intended. Of course initially I thought it was a
bug in my replacement scripts, but they are quite trivial (doing nothing
at all in the del* case, for example), so I eventually came to suspect
they simply never get control. Now I am 100% sure.
This could happend for a number of reasons. PATH could be explicitly
reset to a hardcoded value, or /usr/sbin could be prepended to the
ambient PATH, or some program that wipes the environment clean might be
run "between" aptitude and the maintainer scripts. I am thinking of su
here, as I have seen a number of places where it is used in the aptitude
source. I run aptitude as root though, so I don't know why it would su.
Unfortunately I really don't know which of these possibilities is true
or even which of the morass of packages (aptitude, apt, dpkg, ...) is
responsible. I tried to track it down but it was taking way too much
time :-(
Well, I just tried with command-line apt-get, and it doesn't work
either. So I guess I can eliminate aptitude as the culprit. Filing
against apt, please reassign if necessary.
--
Ian Zimmerman
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