Why the limitation on Windows environnment introduced in OpenSSH 4.0?

[kevin gurney]

Hello all,

First off, thanks for all of your hard work on OpenSSH!

I recently updated our SSH infrastructure from OpenSSH 3.8.1p1 to Cygwin 
1.7 (which includes OpenSSH 5.4p1) and noticed that when running 
commands via ssh on my Windows machines I no longer have access to the 
full set of Windows environment variables.

Digging through source, I see that this change was introduced in v4.0 
(the "fetch_windows_environment()" function in 
openbsd-compat/bsd-cygwin_util.c).

Can anyone shed light on why this was thought to be a "bug" needing 
fixing? And, more importantly, is there a way to work around this? Our 
build system relies on having access to the full set of Windows 
environment variables such as those created by software package 
installations. Having a very restricted Windows environment is causing 
us a ton of grief. The only workable solution we have found is to use a 
~/.ssh/environment file on each of our Windows build machines. Not my 
preferred solution however.

Thanks,
Kevin Gurney
-- 
Oracle <http://www.oracle.com>
Kevin Gurney
Phone: +1 925 6943893 <tel:+1%20925%206943893>

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