Package: debconf Version: 1.4.46 Severity: wishlist Hi,
consider the case that a number of system is administrated by a group of people, which have rather different ways of doing things. So, it is accepted procedure that each user has her local hacks making her work easier, but it is a unwritten rule that you don't change the behavior of the system just out of laziness. One user is frequently in charge of installing package foo, which has a rather elaborate, debconf-driven configuration process. To make the installation go easier, that user has a debconf config database snippet which contains the relevant answers to the debconf questions of package foo. She uses "sudo apt-get install foo" from her personal account, and has a .debconfrc in her home directory which stacks that config file snippet under the system wide debconf database, which allows an uninteractive install of package foo with the correct settings, but without having to mess with the system-wide debconf configuration. This scheme works fine on woody. However, with more recent versions of Debconf, this will cease working since later Debconf versions don't use $HOME any more to determine from where to read .debconfrc, but uses getpwuid($>) which will always point to /root/.debconfrc for package installations, reducing ..debconfrc to just another place to put the system-wide debconf configuration. Please consider implementing a new way to have per-user debconf configuration which is actually used when packages are installed via sudo. One possibility would be a system-wide setting which restores the old behavior, reading $HOME/.debconfrc instead of `getpwuid($>)[7]`/.debconfrc. So root would have to decide whether to take the clearly existing security risk or not. The way it is now in sarge/sid, the local administrators are forced to do weird script origies to simulate the intended behavior. I believe it is better to give them enough rope to hang themselves with stock debconf. Greetings Marc -- System Information: Debian Release: 3.1 APT prefers unstable APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing') Architecture: i386 (i686) Kernel: Linux 2.6.9-zgserver Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=de_DE (charmap=ISO-8859-1) Versions of packages debconf depends on: ii debconf-i18n 1.4.46 full internationalization support ii perl-base 5.8.4-8 The Pathologically Eclectic Rubbis -- debconf information excluded -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
