Bug#907145: gksu: Fails to change PATH according to /ect/sudoers

[Chris Tillman]

Package: gksu
Version: 2.0.2-9+b1
Severity: normal

Dear Maintainer,

   * What led up to the situation?
I was upgrading the testing distribution after several months using aptitude. I
upgraded about half the packages, but when I went to upgrade the other half I
received errors from dpkg:

Preconfiguring packages ...
dpkg: warning: 'ldconfig' not found in PATH or not executable
dpkg: warning: 'start-stop-daemon' not found in PATH or not executable
dpkg: error: 2 expected programs not found in PATH or not executable
Note: root's PATH should usually contain /usr/local/sbin, /usr/sbin and /sbin
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)

   * What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or
     ineffective)?
I searched online and found the cause of the errors was, as the error states,
the PATH being incorrect. I checked the PATH resulting when I chose "Root
Terminal" from the menu, and this path did not include the sbin directories.

root at ctillman:/home/chris# echo $PATH
/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/local/games:/usr/games

I tried sudo from a regular user terminal window to check the path which would
come up with it:

chris at ctillman:~$ sudo bash -c 'echo $PATH'
/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin

And then, because gksu starts Root Terminal, I tried the equivalent with gksu:

chris at ctillman:~$ gksu "bash -c 'echo $PATH'"
gksu-run: gksu/bash -c 'echo
|usr|local|bin:|usr|bin:|bin:|usr|local|games:|usr|games'/5044-0-ctillman_TIME11346051
gksu-run: 1f53968cb8fe3d752131e6a334975c84

/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/local/games:/usr/games

This showed gksu is not changing the path when calling xfce4-terminal.

My /etc/sudoers contents:

root at ctillman:~# cat /etc/sudoers
#
# This file MUST be edited with the 'visudo' command as root.
#
# Please consider adding local content in /etc/sudoers.d/ instead of
# directly modifying this file.
#
# See the man page for details on how to write a sudoers file.
#
Defaults        env_reset
Defaults        mail_badpass
Defaults
secure_path="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin"

# Host alias specification

# User alias specification

# Cmnd alias specification

# User privilege specification
root    ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL
chris   ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL

# Allow members of group sudo to execute any command
%sudo   ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL

# See sudoers(5) for more information on "#include" directives:

#includedir /etc/sudoers.d





-- System Information:
Debian Release: buster/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 4.17.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_NZ.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_NZ.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_NZ:en (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages gksu depends on:
ii  gconf-service             3.2.6-4.1
ii  libatk1.0-0               2.28.1-1
ii  libc6                     2.27-5
ii  libcairo2                 1.15.10-3
ii  libfontconfig1            2.13.0-5
ii  libfreetype6              2.8.1-2
ii  libgconf-2-4              3.2.6-4.1
ii  libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0        2.36.12-2
ii  libgksu2-0                2.0.13~pre1-9+b2
ii  libglib2.0-0              2.56.1-2
ii  libgnome-keyring0         3.12.0-1+b2
ii  libgtk2.0-0               2.24.32-2
ii  libpango-1.0-0            1.42.4-1
ii  libpangocairo-1.0-0       1.42.4-1
ii  libpangoft2-1.0-0         1.42.4-1
ii  libstartup-notification0  0.12-5
ii  sudo                      1.8.23-2

Versions of packages gksu recommends:
ii  gnome-keyring  3.28.2-1

gksu suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information