Bug#349465: vim: Vim makes bad assumptions about the presence of $HOME; problematic with sudo DSA-946-1

[David Young]

Package: vim
Version: 1:6.3-071+1sarge1
Severity: important


Since the recent patch of sudo (DSA-946-1) started filtering the HOME
environment variable (leaving it unset), Vim:

* isn't smart enough to locate a user's homedir in the absence of $HOME

* seems to ask the file system for environment variable names. strace example:

open("$HOME/.viminfo", O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC|O_LARGEFILE, 0666) = -1
ENOENT (No such file or directory)

* fails to find the user's .vimrc

* the following line in the default /etc/vim/vimrc causes Vim to very
noisily fail to locate or create .viminfo :

set viminfo='20,\"50



In summary, the vim package no longer works well by default within 'sudo'.


-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.8-2-386
Locale: LANG=en_AU, LC_CTYPE=en_AU (charmap=ISO-8859-1)

Versions of packages vim depends on:
ii  dpkg                   1.10.28           Package maintenance system for Deb
ii  libc6                  2.3.2.ds1-22      GNU C Library: Shared libraries an
ii  libgpmg1               1.19.6-19sarge1   General Purpose Mouse - shared lib
ii  libncurses5            5.4-4             Shared libraries for terminal hand
ii  vim-common             1:6.3-071+1sarge1 Vi IMproved - Common files

-- no debconf information