Is it normal that dpkg-reconfigure can be affected by environment
variables?

For instance, I have PERL5LIB set to /home/vlefevre/lib/site_perl,
and when I do a "su", this variable is kept in the environment,
and in the strace output on a dpkg-reconfigure, I could see that
$PERL5LIB was searched for Perl modules.

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On Friday 22 January 2010 10:03:07 Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> Is it normal that dpkg-reconfigure can be affected by environment
> variables?

That's pretty normal. Most programs don't go out of their way to ignore your
environment settings.

dpkg-reconfigure also uses things like LANG and LC_* for when it invokes
debconf.

> For instance, I have PERL5LIB set to /home/vlefevre/lib/site_perl,
> and when I do a "su", this variable is kept in the environment,
> and in the strace output on a dpkg-reconfigure, I could see that
> $PERL5LIB was searched for Perl modules.

You can use (su -) to get a "clean" environment. sudo also has features for
cleaning the environment when changing users.
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