Bug#958502: gnome-terminal: Parent environment variables not not passed to new tabs

[Gary Kramlich]

Package: gnome-terminal
Version: 3.36.1.1-3
Severity: important

Dear Maintainer,

While I believe this to be a 100% upstream bug, I am reporting this here due to
the instruction on gnome's gitlab instance for gnome-terminal that have asked
that all bugs go through the distributions first.

For the past two weeks or so, whenever I ran an upgrade and got gnome-terminal
3.36, I've had issues with my ssh-agent.  At first I thought it was crashing or
something, so I just `eval $(ssh-agent)` and kept working.  However, today I
realized that the agent still works on ther original tab that was created in
the gnome-terminal window.

I started experimenting and found that there are quite a few differences in the
environment variables between the initial tab and any that are created after
the application has launched.  Notably, the biggest issue is that SSH_AUTH_SOCK
and GPG_AGENT_INFO are *NOT* passed to any newly created tab.  This is super
annoying as it basically makes the tab feature of gnome-terminal completely
useless for some that uses their ssh agent a lot.

I did try setting the "use login shell" option on my profile, but that doesn't
work for the ssh and gpg agents because those are processes launched by my X
session and not part of my shell login.

I've created a video showing how to reproduce the issue and it can be found
at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFgjBCaDH4g.

I did start to experiment with trying to bisect the code to find the bug, but
I couldn't figure out a good way to test on an existing install and I don't
have the time at the moment to setup a virtual machine to debug this further.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: bullseye/sid
  APT prefers unstable-debug
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable-debug'), (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 5.5.0-2-amd64 (SMP w/64 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages gnome-terminal depends on:
ii  dbus-user-session [default-dbus-session-bus]  1.12.16-2
ii  dconf-gsettings-backend [gsettings-backend]   0.36.0-1
ii  gnome-terminal-data                           3.36.1.1-2
ii  gsettings-desktop-schemas                     3.36.0-1
ii  libatk1.0-0                                   2.36.0-2
ii  libc6                                         2.30-4
ii  libdconf1                                     0.36.0-1
ii  libglib2.0-0                                  2.64.2-1
ii  libgtk-3-0                                    3.24.18-1
ii  libpango-1.0-0                                1.44.7-4
ii  libuuid1                                      2.34-0.1
ii  libvte-2.91-0                                 0.60.1-1
ii  libx11-6                                      2:1.6.9-2

Versions of packages gnome-terminal recommends:
ii  gvfs                               1.44.1-1
ii  nautilus-extension-gnome-terminal  3.36.1.1-3
ii  yelp                               3.34.0-1

gnome-terminal suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information