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. -- debconf-show failed -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-x-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
