Debian unstable - ldconfig gone after update

[Tharbad]

Hi everyone,

I have a VM with Debian unstable. After an update ldconfig is missing. ldconfig is part of libc-bin which should be part of the basic installation. Therefore I'm assuming it's a bug.
I already reverted the VM to a 20.7.2018 snapshot and it happened again.
Ideas?

Thanks

[Bloom]

Why don't you simply reinstall libc-bin?
I'm running Sid, too. No such problem here.

[Tharbad]

Tried. It failed.

Anyway I found a solution buried in debian mailing lists: I should use "su -" instead of "su". Otherwise I can't use ldconfig.
Do you know of a place to read about news like this?

[Bloom]

Or sudo, like:

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sudo ldconfig

What commands do you need to execute as root? Everything that changes the system of another user's data. If you which to do something within your own home directory, you don't need to use root privileges.

[milomak]

Tried. It failed.

Anyway I found a solution buried in debian mailing lists: I should use "su -" instead of "su". Otherwise I can't use ldconfig.
Do you know of a place to read about news like this?

am i correct that you were doing

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$ su
# ldconfig


if so, then yes su on its own no longer picks up the root environment. you need to add the <space><dash> after su. this is obviously in sid (maybe testing) and not stable

[Tharbad]

It's in unstable.
ldconfig runs after a kernel update...

[4D696B65]

Anyway I found a solution buried in debian mailing lists: I should use "su -" instead of "su". Otherwise I can't use ldconfig.
Do you know of a place to read about news like this?

Yes, you can read about it right here. Its been talked about for weeks.

[Tharbad]

This forum or another?

[milomak]

if you are running sid without apt-listbugs and apt-listchanges then you have no one to blame but yourself

because listchanges made this clear

[GarryRicketson]

This forum or another?

This forum.
It also has come up on some other forums as well:
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/460478/debian-su-and-su-path-differences/460769#460769

Quoting from util-linux/NEWS.Debian.gz:
The two implementations are very similar but have some minor differences (and there might be more that was not yet noticed ofcourse), e.g.

new 'su' (with no args, i.e. when preserving the environment) also preserves PATH and IFS, while old su would always reset PATH and IFS even in 'preserve environment' mode.
su '' (empty user string) used to give root, but now returns an error.
previously su only had one pam config, but now 'su -' is configured separately in /etc/pam.d/su-l
The first difference is probably the most user visible one. Doing plain 'su' is a really bad idea for many reasons, so using 'su -' is strongly recommended to always get a newly set up environment similar to a normal login. If you want to restore behaviour more similar to the previous one you can add 'ALWAYS_SET_PATH yes' in /etc/login.defs.

[Tharbad]

Thanks GarryRicketson.

milomak: I'm running on unstable as I'm testing it against Arch.

[GarryRicketson]

Your welcome,
I do expect this

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su and su -

change will catch a few people by surprise though, and expect to see more posts asking about what is going on, it is fairly recent. Guess that would be another topic though,...sorry,
carry on.