@Zanna I realize I drifted off that point yesterday. I am aware of some factors that might offer limited insight into why Ubuntu was patched in 2011 to keep the old sudo behavior of preserving $HOME.
The upstream change seems to have been on 2010-07-19, as shown in the changelog:
> * WHATSNEW, doc/UPGRADE, doc/sudo.cat, doc/sudo.man.in, doc/sudo.pod, doc/sudoers.cat, doc/sudoers.man.in, doc/sudoers.pod, plugins/sudoers/env.c: Reset HOME when env_reset is enabled unless it is in env_keep [f421f8827340]
Yes, here's the full information on the commit. Changes to the documentation files, shown near the top of the page, describe the significance of the code change. The code change itself can be found by searching on that page for initial_keepenv_table.
That can be examined together with the patch used in Ubuntu (up through 19.04) to undo the change, which was removed for 19.10.
@Zanna Apparently there were some usage patterns that benefited from it. Specifically, it seems like many developers used pbuilder in a way that broke with the change (though I suspect undoing the change wasn't the best fix, and that slightly changing how they used pbuilder might have been sufficient).
ok, I think I have managed to finally arrive at the conclusion that the reason for it was that a few involved people happened to be using sudo in a slightly unusual way and found the change slightly inconvenient, and they thought it was important enough to do something about, and they were unaware of the reasons for the change, and they knew that users could get the new behaviour using the -H or -i flags anyway.
@TheLittleNaruto They aren't really accessible to me as a beginner in the topics. I think I had fun doing something with Python dictionaries once, but clearly I didn't get enough practice with that to understand your post about it much. So, sorry not to be more helpful w/r/t/ the content.
If you wanted tips on English (which you've asked for in other contexts), I thought of two general points to mention. One is that we can say either "what it looks [or sounds or is etc] like" or "how it looks" but not "what it looks like". So in this article, where you have "here is a snippet how it looks like", I would write "here is a snippet showing what it looks like"
the other point is hahaha that in the phase "no shit", "shit" means lies (as in "bullshit"), so people say "no shit" sarcastically when someone says something that was too obvious to mention. Like "wow it's raining really heavily" "no shit!" (you are right about that, you are not lying, but we can all see for ourselves). So when you say the driver does "no shit", I think you meant the phrase "the driver doesn't do shit", where "shit" means "anything", i.e., the driver doesn't do anything.
