Re: [Nano-devel] Long search string in history.

[Chris Allegretta]

On Tue, Feb 18, 2003 at 02:40:36PM +0100, Jordi Mallach wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 12, 2003 at 04:03:59PM -0800, Chris Allegretta wrote:
> > - Deciding about this getpwent() issue.  I don't think this will be an 
> > isolated incident.  Bash and Id imagine most unix programs simply use 
> > getenv("HOME").  I will likely revert to using that, and perhaps use 
> > getpwuid(geteuid()) as a fallback (thank you for the suggestion Jordi :)
> 
> Hmm. Back to this...
> 
>  debconf (1.2.25) unstable; urgency=low
>  .
>    * To find .debconfrc, look up the home directory of the current user with
>      getpwuid, instead of trusting $HOME, which is untrustworthy thanks to
>      programs like sudo. Closes: #181288
> 
> FWIW, I have one user in my server which uses nano to edit a file under
> another user id. I guess I could be bitten by this, too.

Bash seems to use getenv("HOME") to look for .bashrc and vim seems to
use it to look for .vimrc.  sudo seems to be a bit oddball because the
man page says it doesn't modify $HOME unless the -H option is used.  I
don't think that's our problem though.  

Given the feedback we got from pre2 (before I reverted the behavior),
we're likely to get millions of bug reports of users of misconfigured
NIS systems who have no control over the system setup but do have
control over their $HOME variable and say "every other program works,
why doesn't nano?"

Chris A
-- 
Chris Allegretta        http://www.asty.org

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