Hello Theo,

Theo de Raadt wrote on Tue, Jul 22, 2025 at 09:05:09AM -0600:
> Stuart Henderson <stu@spacehopper.org> wrote:
>> On 2025/07/22 13:12, Manuel Giraud wrote:
>>> Crystal Kolipe <kolipe.c@exoticsilicon.com> writes:

>>>> I can confirm that NetBSD does _not_ support env -S.

>>> What I gather from this discussion is that it would be "nice to have"
>>> user feature while not being standardized and potentially unsafe.  So
>>> maybe, we should not support this.  Sorry for the noise.

>> also, we didn't have to patch any instances of this in ports.

> So nothing needs this now.  They don't even use the genv variation.
> Is it actually _used_ in another operating system?
> Can someone do the grep?

https://codesearch.debian.net/search?q=env+-S&literal=1

finds hits in 106 packages:

  aiocoap android-platform-tools apertium-nno-nob bash-unit bpftrace
  brltty calibre ceph cjs clisp containerd coreutils cpu-features
  emacs emscripten ess faiss firefox firefox-esr foot freedict-tools
  fwupd gambas3 gettext ghc gitaly gitlab gjs gmt gnome-maps gnome-shell
  gnome-shell-extension-gsconnect gnudatalanguage gnulib
  golang-github-alecthomas-chroma-v2 golang-golang-x-vuln gtk4 guile-ssh
  guix harfbuzz haskell-dhall howm hyprland identify ikiwiki
  intrusive-shared-ptr json2file-go kind kristall libfirefox-marionette-perl
  libunistring liquidsoap littler lunar-date manpages-l10n mariadb
  mawk meli mozjs128 mozjs140 mpd neovim nim nix node-speech-rule-engine
  node-undici o-saft package-lint-el pam-python parallel phcpack
  pyglossary python-aiohttp python-openai python-pdoc qt6-webengine
  qtwebengine-opensource-src radare2 rocksdb rsync rust-cargo rust-just
  rust-rpacket rust-rustls rust-rustls-platform-verifier rust-testresult
  rustc shellcheck shepherd sisu stumpwm texworks thunderbird tpm2-tools
  ts-node tuxguitar upower usbutils ustreamer vimium visidata votca
  weechat-matrix wordgrinder xelb zfs-linux

A cursory look at the first few pages (of the 41 pages of results)
gives me the impression that a significant number of these actually
use "env -S", or suggest using it to the user - but i didn't bother
onvestigating whether the purposes it is used for actually matter.
On first sight, some of the uses are in test suites, for example.

The fact that not having env -S didn't cause any pain for porters
in the past tells us more than finding 106 packages with Debian
codesearch, IMHO.

I don't consider my opinion on this authoritative, but adding a
non-standard option that might be prone to misuse to a standard
utility does not sound very reasonable to me unless there are very
strong reasons, and the demand seems sparse at best, so far.

Yours,
  Ingo