[ Please don't Cc: public replies to me. ] (I'm feeling that I'm overly negative again. Sorry. I'll shut up if someone shows a good example of why a new mechanism for setting up default environments is needed.) Raul Miller: > Then, any sufficiently privileged program that wants to create a > login shell for a user just needs to call exec(). Xterm doesn't call login to create a login shell; it calls the shell and sets argv[0][0] to '-'. This cryptic convention is the normal way to do it on Unix. If we change it, we'd have to change all programs that do it. > Even netpbm and mh? For that matter, X11? Netpbm requires no special setup (all the commands are now in /usr/bin, not in /usr/bin/pbmplus). MH requires that you add /usr/bin/mh to the path, but that should _not_ happen to all users. The only reason to keep MH in its own subdirectory is to allow people to avoid it completely. Only people who use MH should pub /usr/bin/mh in their path. X11 setup is already being done by startx and xdm, no change is required. > I agree, in general, that programs should work without special > setup, but certain updates (to path, manpath, and maybe > library oriented env variables) should pervade the system. A reasonable path is already set in /etc/profile, anyway. Normal packages will install their commands to /usr/bin. Special packages will install commands elsewhere; like MH, those commands shouldn't be on the default path. manpath is set from /etc/manpath.config, and is read from there by the man program; no environment variables needed, in the normal case. Libraries don't require any special variables to work, in the normal case. Package installation shouldn't cause special cases, I think. -- Please read <http://www.iki.fi/liw/mail-to-lasu.html> before mailing me. Please don't Cc: me when replying to my message on a mailing list.
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