Re: XDG_CONFIG_DIRS, desktop-base (and Xfce)

[Loïc Minier <lool@dooz.org>]

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009, Yves-Alexis Perez wrote:
> Even better would be a stuff sourced at boot time and not X startup
> time, but I'm not sure it exists.

 It doesn't; also, some daemons will reset the environment, I think ssh
 does it for instance.  You can't even make sure all useful sessions are
 PAM sessions.  In Ubuntu, there was a spec to have a /etc/environment
 and make sure that it was used to set the default PATH, but this relied
 on pam_environment, and so would only affect PAM services (not apache
 for instance, or services not using the common-session).

 So there's no single place where you can set the env, nor a guarantee
 that it wont be lost.  My recommendation would be to either patch
 xfce-session or whatever is the first process in a Xfce session or do
 it in Xsession.d, but that wont be used in some cases.  An user named
 "cobaco" worked on a "xdg-profiles" app which would set such vars on
 all logins, using shell init files for various shells.  IMO this is
 doomed to fail as well.  We had lengthy discussions on this topic in
 the past, which you can easily find with google.

 So if I were you, I'd go back to the basic questions: I think you want
 to enable Xfce sessions to use the XDG data provided by desktop-base;
 all Xfce sessions start by xfce-session, so you could patch that.  If
 you consider that all useful Xfce session you care about start in
 Xsession.d, then do it at that level.  It might cover more DEs, but
 less use cases.

-- 
Loïc Minier