kde-config creates $HOME/.kde

[Francois Gouget]

Binary package hint: kdelibs4c2a

kde-config creates the '$HOME/.kde/share/config' directory if it does not exist. This is a problem if one runs it via sudo (possibly indirectly) because then it creates a directory that the non-root user has no access to and cannot delete.

To reproduce this issue, do the following:

$ rm -rf ~/.kde
$ ls -ld ~/.kde
ls: /home/weaver/.kde: No such file or directory
$ sudo kde-config
[sudo] password for weaver:
$ ls -ld ~/.kde
drwx------ 3 root root 4096 2008-09-09 16:32 /home/weaver/.kde
$ rm -rf .kde
rm: cannot chdir from `.' to `.kde': Permission denied

Another easier way to reproduce the issue is to tweak $HOME:

$ mkdir /tmp/decoy
$ HOME=/tmp/decoy kde-config
$ ls -ld /tmp/decoy/.kde
drwx------ 3 weaver weaver 4096 2008-09-09 16:41 /tmp/decoy/.kde

This bug happens on both Ubuntu 7.10 and Ubuntu 8.04, but strangely not on my Debian Testing system.

[Jonathan Thomas (echidnaman)]

Any situation that would cause this would arise from launching KDE apps with sudo rather than kdesudo or gksu.

[Francois Gouget (fgouget)]

I think this is not a duplicate of bug 53845.

A regular KDE application needs to set up a complex runtime environment. For instance in bug 53845 we see that a simple text editor needs to start kdeinit, kded, knotify, kio_uiserver and maybe others. All these expect a fully set up environment and likely write state information in ~/.kde thus forcing its creation at some point.

However kde-config does not fork and exec any of these servers. Also a look at an strace shows no justification for creating ~/.kde. So it should be possible to fix kde-config to not create ~/.kde completely independently from whether 'sudo kate' can be made to behave sensibly or not.

[Terence Simpson (tsimpson)]

Maybe strace shows no justification, but try "kde-config --localprefix", "kde-config --path ..." and "kde-config --userpath" options. The functions used to read this information also seems to create them, so there's nothing kde-config can do (or that we can do to kde-config).

[Francois Gouget (fgouget)]

So maybe this bug should be reassigned to the package these functions are implemented in!
In the meantime, here's a proposed 'patch'... wrap kde-config with the following script:

---
#!/bin/sh
decoy=""
if [ -z "$HOME" ]
then
    decoy="/tmp/decoy"
    touch "$decoy"
fi
kde-config "$@"
rc="$?"
[ -z "$decoy" ] || rm "$decoy"
exit $rc
---

This does not impact kde-config's results in any way and stops it from messing up the poor user's account.

[Francois Gouget (fgouget)]

This does not look like a duplicate of bug #930912 "gui apps don't start, XAUTHORITY environment variable not kept" to me.