Bug#276419: [Pkg-shadow-devel] Bug#276419: [Pbuilder-maint] Shall Debian's su conform to other implementations

[Christian Perrier]

> The ideal way to approach this is to announce a change, 

Which is what we are doing now. We neglected to do so the first time
(mostly because we didn't anticipate this would break pbuilder so
much)  and this is why we reverted the change very quickly.

> document that change, provide some environmental variable

It will be documented. We have a ready document, written by the
original bug reporter, which documents the changes and gives
recommendations for fixing affected usage of su.

We didn't want to send it now because it's a long and deeply technical
document and we first wanted to get input from people, like you, who
are already aware of the issue.

> support for that change (like POSIXLY_CORRECT)
> 
> Then change.
> 
> We've got quite a bit of tools in sarge that doesn't work with
> this change, right?


>From what Nicolas investigated, not that much. He only found dchroot
and pbuilder up to now. Nicolas does not pretend to have a complete
investigation but I trust him when he mentions he tried as widely as
possible.