Never suggest "sudo -E"

[MichaIng]

Passing the full environment from the user session to the root session is seen as potential privacy and security issue.

If a particular environment variable is intended to be passed through, sudo --preserve-env=VAR can be used, or sudo VAR=value to set it explicitly. The prior is used in the two cases, where the EDITOR environment variable is mentioned in the context.

[katshann-raspberry]

HI @MichaIng Thank you for your contribution. I'll check with our engineers which variables need to be passed in some of these cases and we'll progress these updates to publish shortly.

[lurch]

See also https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom/blob/master/rpi-eeprom-config#L532

[MichaIng]

Thanks for the hint, which confirms that it is about the EDITOR variable. Instead of setting export EDITOR=vi and then passing it via --preserve-env=EDITOR, maybe it is easier to instead suggest

sudo EDITOR=vi rpi-eeprom-config --edit

to set it directly? Wording could be aligned and changed to something like

...

sudo rpi-eeprom-config --edit

The default text editor is nano and may be overridden by setting the 'EDITOR'
environment variable, e.g. to use Vim in next example.

sudo EDITOR=vi rpi-eeprom-config --edit

[katshann-raspberry]

There are some other places in the docs where we already listed this command without -E. So I'm wondering if telling folks how to set their editor is beyond our scope here. Perhaps best to just have the simplest version of the command consistently throughout? (sudo rpi-eeprom-config --edit)

[MichaIng]

Being a nano guy, I am not sure how common it is that CLI tools respect $EDITOR, but generally I think it is good to know that rpi-eeprom-config does. But should be sufficient in the --help output/manpage and maybe in the most canonical page of the docs about the rpi-eeprom-config command? I wonder which one it is, as the sections in the first 3 files edited by this PR are almost identical, even the headings 😄:

==== Edit the bootloader configuration
==== Editing the current bootloader configuration
=== Edit the configuration

Regarding how to pass the environment variable through sudo, I agree that it is probably out of scope: Anyone who has multiple editors installed, and prefers one over another, will have likely faced and know about this already. And nano is a safe default: faster to grasp than vi for noobs, and those who can use and prefer vi, can deal with nano as well, especially for such a tiny bootloader config. That it is about ~3-5 key=value lines is probably also the best argument, that fiddling with $EDITOR in the docs is kinda overkill.