Re: [PATCH] gnu: xterm: Accept $SHELL even if not in /etc/shells

[John Darrington]

On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 03:47:54AM -0500, Mark H Weaver wrote:
     John Darrington <address@hidden> writes:
     
     > On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 03:00:29AM -0500, Mark H Weaver wrote:
     >      This patch makes xterm honor $SHELL (or the shell in the user's 
password
     >      entry) even if it's not in /etc/shells.  WDYT?
     >      
     > It sounds like a good idea to me.  /etc/shells is supposed to be only a 
whitelist of
     > those shells which may be used for login.  Not an exhaustive list of 
shells which
     > may be used at all.
     >
     > However, I'm wondering if we are forking too many upstream packages.  We 
should
     > only patch software in order to allow it to build/install.
     
     Really?  Just enough to build/install?  Not enough to work properly?  I
     agree that we should stay as close as we reasonably can to upstream, but
     sometimes things have to be fixed to work with Guix, which after all is
     a rather unusual distro.

     FYI, xterm doesn't merely ignore your $SHELL setting if it's not in
     /etc/shells, it also *sets* $SHELL to "/bin/sh" for you in that case,
     and then proceeds runs it.

Then that to me, sounds like a bug in xterm and can potentially affect many 
OSes not only guix.
     
     IMO, it's not reasonable to have to add
     /home/<USER>/<PROFILE>/bin/<SHELL> for every combination of <USER>,
     <PROFILE>, and <SHELL> to /etc/shells, in order to prevent 'xterm' from
     overriding your $SHELL setting.

I don't disagree.
     
     > If they refuse the patch, then of course you can start your own
     > weavershell fork...
     
     Fork it to change two lines?
     
Two lines today, five tomorrow, twenty next week ...

It is true that Guix is somewhat unusual - and therefore it exposes bugs in 
packages which hitherto have gone unnoticed.  That doesn't change the fact that 
they are bugs in upstream.  Of course it might be difficult getting upstream to
accept a patch but we should try.

I'm just making the point that Guix is not a repository of bug fixes!
     
Just my $0.02

J'


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