Bug#670733: Some remarks

[Romain Beauxis]

2012/6/11 Hendrik Tews <tews at os.inf.tu-dresden.de>:
> Romain Beauxis <romain.beauxis at gmail.com> writes:
>
>   I agree that the configure test is naive, but it relies on reasonable
>   and documented behaviours and variables.
>
> OK. What is your source of documentation for the contents of
> $USER?

If you're talking about an "official" documentation that states "Hey
dude, USER env. variable must contain the name of the running user" I
have none. but I'd say it amounts to saying that water wets or fire
burns. Now, as you pointed out, the variable is referred to at least
here as a variable that is "frequently exported by widely used command
interpreters and applications":
  http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/xbd_chap08.html

A quick search also showed that there may be many other functions
relaying on this variable to find our the running user, for instance:

"getpass.getuser()
Return the “login name” of the user. Availability: Unix, Windows.

This function checks the environment variables LOGNAME, USER, LNAME
and USERNAME, in order, and returns the value of the first one which
is set to a non-empty string. If none are set, the login name from the
password database is returned on systems which support the pwd module,
otherwise, an exception is raised."

    http://docs.python.org/library/getpass.html

Finally, after a second though, this issue is not even a RC issue
because the module clearly does not fail to build in the buildds, it
just fails to build with _pbuilder_, which makes a huge difference..

Romain