[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#726028: policykit-1: Authorisation error in KDE when GREP_OPTIONS include output options

[James Bannon]

Package: policykit-1
Version: 0.105-3
Severity: important

Dear Maintainer,

Setting GREP_OPTIONS in either $HOME/.profile or $HOME/.bash_profile affecting
grep's output causes authorisation failures in KDE. E.g., try the following:

export GREP_OPTIONS="--color=auto --initial-tab --line-number"

When KDE starts, you get an authorisation error from the apt update daemon.
Also, anything requiring administrative privileges to change, such as Login
screen, will refuse to grant access. The refusal is not logged in any of the
usual places that I can see.

The same applies if an alias is defined like this:

alias grep='grep --color=auto --initial-tab --line-number'

In either case, removing --line-number and --initial-tab restores the
authorisation. Setting --color is OK, so long as it's set to auto.

The problem does not appear when using GNOME or XFCE, but their respective
login managers don't source $HOME/.profile or $HOME/.bash_profile. I believe
the problem would also affect users of XDM and SLIM.

I thought it may be due to an unguarded call to grep in a system shell script
somewhere, but I haven't been able to track it down so far.

If memory serves, Ubuntu and Linux Mint used to have exactly the same problem.
I believe they fixed it, but don't quote me on that.

I have logged this as important because, although the workaround is easy to
apply, it is very confusing. I thought I had a major SNAFU in my configuration,
until I remembered I experienced the problem before.

Thanks.



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

Kernel: Linux 3.10-3-amd64 (SMP w/6 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages policykit-1 depends on:
ii  consolekit             0.4.6-3+b1
ii  dbus                   1.6.14-1
ii  libc6                  2.17-93
ii  libexpat1              2.1.0-4
ii  libglib2.0-0           2.36.4-1
ii  libpam0g               1.1.3-9
ii  libpolkit-agent-1-0    0.105-3
ii  libpolkit-backend-1-0  0.105-3
ii  libpolkit-gobject-1-0  0.105-3

policykit-1 recommends no packages.

policykit-1 suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information