Hi,

I do appreciate some scripts shipped by ubuntu-dev-tools, especially
requestsync for example. But, a lot of scripts do use intensively
"sudo". Is it so hard to type "sudo $command"? Or, at least, $command
should inform the user that some operations are performed using
"sudo".

Please try to reduce the usage of sudo in your scripts!

For example, check-symbols, mk-sbuild and get-build-deps are really
scary. I don't think sudo's usage in those scripts is an absolute
necessity.

(check-symbols is broken by design... but that's another story).

Regards,

One may argue that this bug should have severity "critical" since usage of
sudo (like what's done in check-symbols or mk-sbuild) might "make
unrelated software on the system break". But, maybe its too much for this
bug. I'll let you decide which severity is more appropriate.

(I originally set tags because 1) there is nothing to fix at this point in
Squeeze imho, and 2) still don't know if it should have an RC severity).

Regards,

Hi Mehdi (2011.05.20_14:05:45_+0200)
that can be trivially fixed in many of them.

Examples:
sudo defaults to unsetting HOME these days, so sudo pbuilder-dist will
do the wrong thing (read the wrong .pbuilderrc).

In packages that test-build, pbuilder needs to be run as root, but one
doesn't want to prepare the source package as root.

mk-sbuild needs to do some things as root (i.e. playing with LVs), and
some as the user. But running sudo apt-get when the user types mk-sbuild
--help, is rather obnoxious :) (I fixed this in 0.123)

setup-packaging-environment needs to do some things as root, but not
everything. It's meant to be an easy-to-use script, and to do the right
thing.

Now for the good news:

We know we have a bunch of cruft in ubuntu-dev-tools, and are trying to
do something about it. We had a discussion at UDS:
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu-dev-tools/+spec/other-o-udt-upstreaming

Many of the problematic scripts are intended to go away, and be merged
with similar scripts that are lacking some necessary bit of
functionality.
mk-sbuild, check-symbols, get-build-deps and reverse-build-depends are
all scheduled for merging.

pbuilder-dist{,-simple} can hopefully be taken over by pbuilder.

For the unfixable scripts, that's probably the best thing to do.

SR