lxc list run via sudo creates root-owned files in the user's home directory

[Rod Smith]

LXD description:
1. Fresh 18.04 server
2. Run "sudo lxc list"
3. Note new root owned ~/.config directory.

This does not occur on Eoan including with snap version of 3.0.4.

Previous description:
On a fresh Ubuntu 18.04 server installation, running sosreport creates root-owned files in ~/.config. Specifically, I'm using the following command:

sudo sosreport --batch --tmp-dir /tmp/

Prior to running this command, ~/.config did not exist. After running the command, ~/.config exists and is owned by root, with a lxd subdirectory:

$ sudo ls -lR .config
.config:
total 4
drwxr-x--- 2 root root 4096 Sep 19 12:16 lxc

.config/lxc:
total 8
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 188 Sep 19 12:16 config.yml
-rw------- 1 root root 5 Sep 19 12:16 cookies

This root ownership of ~/.config and ~/.config/lxd causes problems for subsequent programs run without sudo.

$ apt-cache policy sosreport
sosreport:
  Installed: 3.6-1ubuntu0.18.04.3
  Candidate: 3.6-1ubuntu0.18.04.3
  Version table:
 *** 3.6-1ubuntu0.18.04.3 500
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-updates/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     3.5-1ubuntu3 500
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic/main amd64 Packages

I've reported this bug upstream:

https://github.com/sosreport/sos/issues/1787

[Bryan Quigley (bryanquigley)]

Reassigning to LXD, as it's reproducible with a simple
sudo lxc list.

[Dan Streetman (ddstreet)]

This is likely due to bug 1556302, which is fixed starting in Eoan but will not be changed in Disco or earlier.

On Ubuntu releases pre-Eoan, sudo should be invoked with -H or -i (the -i param does more than -H, but both will change $HOME to the target user's home dir).

[Stéphane Graber (stgraber)]

Marking as invalid for LXD. This is a question of how you're using or configuring sudo.