[Popcon-developers] Bug#429405: Wrong usage of su in /etc/cron.weekly/popularity-contest (New bug)

[Klaus Ethgen]

Package: popularity-contest
Version: 1.41
Severity: important

Long time now I got the following line every week:
Jun 17 22:06:07 ikki popularity-contest: unable to submit report to http://popcon.debian.org/cgi-bin/popcon.cgi.

I was wondering why I get this message as everything with this site was
OK. Now I search a bit further and found the bug.

Appear of that the error message is completely useless if the error
occurs if the report is empty there is a wrong usage of 'su' in
/etc/cron.weekly/popularity-contest. As you can see from 'getent passwd
nobody':
nobody:x:65534:65534:nobody:/nonexistent:/bin/false

my System has no useful shell for user nobody (as it should ever be by
the way). So su will ever fail if it is not called with '-s'. You will
find a little patch for the file above in the attachment.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 4.0
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (800, 'stable'), (700, 'testing'), (600, 'unstable'), (500, 'oldstable'), (60, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Kernel: Linux 2.4.34
Locale: LANG=de_DE, LC_CTYPE=de_DE (charmap=ISO-8859-1) (ignored: LC_ALL set to de_DE)

Versions of packages popularity-contest depends on:
ii  debconf [debconf-2.0]         1.5.13     Debian configuration management sy
ii  dpkg                          1.13.25    package maintenance system for Deb

Versions of packages popularity-contest recommends:
ii  cron                          3.0pl1-100 management of regular background p
ii  exim4                         4.63-17    metapackage to ease exim MTA (v4) 
ii  exim4-daemon-heavy [mail-tran 4.63-17    exim MTA (v4) daemon with extended
ii  mime-construct                1.9        construct/send MIME messages from 

-- debconf information:
  popularity-contest/submiturls:
* popularity-contest/participate: true

-- 
Klaus Ethgen                            http://www.ethgen.de/
pub  2048R/D1A4EDE5 2000-02-26 Klaus Ethgen <Klaus at Ethgen.de>
Fingerprint: D7 67 71 C4 99 A6 D4 FE  EA 40 30 57 3C 88 26 2B
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