UsrMove feature (was Re: FESCo meeting minutes for 2011-10-24)

[Daniel J Walsh]

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On 10/25/2011 03:21 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Tue, 2011-10-25 at 20:39 +0200, Michał Piotrowski wrote:
>> 2011/10/25 Richard W.M. Jones <rjones at redhat.com>:
>>> On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 08:33:28PM +0200, Michał Piotrowski
>>> wrote:
>>>> 2011/10/25 Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net>:
>>>>> Once upon a time, Michał Piotrowski <mkkp4x4 at gmail.com>
>>>>> said:
>>>>>> I created feature page 
>>>>>> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/F18MorePortableInterpreters
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>> 
I strongly object to this "feature".  /bin/sh is a Unix standard back to
>>>>> IIRC around 7th Edition, and there is NO good reason to
>>>>> break it.  The "#!/usr/bin/env foo" suggested replacement
>>>>> has always been a hack to work around broken systems, not
>>>>> something suggested for all scripts.
>>>> 
>>>> What is wrong with #!/usr/bin/env interpreter from technical
>>>> POV?
>>> 
>>> This is what's wrong:
>>> 
>>> $ cat > sh.sh #!/bin/sh $ cat > env.sh #!/usr/bin/env sh $
>>> chmod +x sh.sh env.sh $ time for i in $(seq 1000); do ./sh.sh;
>>> done
>>> 
>>> real            0m2.737s user            0m0.750s sys
>>> 0m1.519s $ time for i in $(seq 1000); do ./env.sh; done
>>> 
>>> real            0m3.677s user            0m1.013s sys
>>> 0m2.296s
>>> 
>> 
>> Yeah, it is noticeably slower - about 0,00094s.
> 
> Uh. ~2.7secs vs. ~3.7 secs is nearly one entire second, not one
> tiny tiny fraction of a second, isn't it?


There are also possible Security ramifications of allowing the
interpreter to be replaced, users could stumble upon this.

Python even tries to prevent this with the -Es qualifier.

man python
...
       -s     Don't add user site directory to sys.path.
       -E     Ignore environment variables like PYTHONPATH and
PYTHONHOME that
              modify the behavior of the interpreter.

I think putting
#!/usr/bin/env interpreter
is a very bad idea for administrative tools.

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