Bug#276419: [Pkg-shadow-devel] Bug#276419: su appends the positional args to the command line

[Christian Perrier]

> > Actually, we did revert to a broken su.
> 
> I think that this is a bad thing (TM). Hopefully you'll change your mind and
> help debian getting rid of this long standing bug :)

Again and again and again, please read the whole rationale. After
doing the change, it rapidly turned out that it broke some important
packages.

Whether they are wrong or not is not relevant now: the consequence
was, as Junichi Uekawa pointed, that we broke packages such as
pbuilder without prior warning. We did not intend to do so of course
and, as we are nice to our fellow Debian developer, we don't want to
break their work without warning.

Moreover, unstable being in the middle of an important transition
(namely GCC 4.0 with ABI changes), this was absolutely NOT the moment
to break useful build tools.

> I don't feel the need for overkilling mecanism here. I feel that Helmut
> perfectly demonstrated at least twice why this bug has to be fixed. I

I DON'T NEED TO BE CONVINCED AGAIN.

OK, have I yelled enough now? :-)

But, pals, seeing everyone trying to "convince" someone who is already
convinced is kinda painful.

We will make this transition and, as I explained already, we will make
it barely the way you described.

What I fear a little is the discussion that is likely to follow in
-develwith people nitpicking the arguments we have for doing the
change.

*Here* I expect you, shadow maintainers AND Helmut, to help me in
explaining with the Right Arguments, why we have to change this. You
all know that I'm too technically challenged for doing so.

> With sarge just released, it looks like a perfect time to go for this
> transition. C++ ABI transition seems faaar much intrusive (and somehow
> discutable, but it must be my anti-c++ religious position) to me than this
> *fix*.
> 
> I'd say that we need to summarize the rationnal and how to adapt packages to
> the new, fixed behaviour on, say, 100 lines, post it to
> debian-devel-announce under the title "su behaviour transition" or so, wait
> 2 weeks, and upload a fixed version.


Sure. But not during August while many DD's are VAC (and not only
French ones). We should make the announcement ASAP. Idealistically
before I leave for holidays on Aug 1st for something like 3 weeks.

This announcement would mention September 15th as target release date
for the change, leaving people enough time to preventively adapt their
work.

The announcement must be as short as possible and be very clear bout
the consequence. Deep technical details and rationale should be left
to an appendix.