Bug#869506: Please don't drop environment variables

[Guido Günther]

Hi,
On Sun, Jul 23, 2017 at 11:43:02PM +0200, Raphaël Halimi wrote:
> Le 23/07/2017 à 22:34, Guido Günther a écrit :
> > All of this was prompted by
> > 
> >     https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=865637
> > 
> > so not cleaning e.g. DIST and ARCH breaks builds and generic names like
> > this really shouldn't end up in the process's environment. We don't
> > clean things like
> > 
> >     GIT_PBUILDER_*
> > 
> > (see https://github.com/agx/git-buildpackage/blob/master/gbp/scripts/buildpackage.py#L488)
> > so all we'd need to do is teach pbuilder to read DIST, ARCH and BUILDER
> > with a GIT_PBUILDER_ prefix as well. What do you think? A patch would be
> > welcome.
> 
> After reading all of those links, I'm all the more convinced that
> cleaning the environment should be pbuilder's job, and not gbp's. All
> environment variables given by the user should be passed on to pbuilder
> as-is, since the latter needs them to properly set its directories (I
> guess most people follow one of those wikis when they install pbuilder
> for the first time), but if a clean environment must be passed to the
> chroot, IMHO it would be pbuilder's responsibility to do that.

Russ, do you have an opinion on this one. The generic variable names are
imho calling for trouble (although they're very convenient to type). We
could still accept them in git-pbuilder but only pass on GIT_PBUILDER_
prefixed ones.
Only cleaning out these three variables in pbuilder itself looks special
cased either.

Cheers,
 -- Guido