Re: Another possible slink goal (multipackages users profile)

[Martin Schulze <joey@kuolema.Infodrom.North.DE>]

Wichert Akkerman wrote:
> Previously Martin Schulze wrote:
> > Thats what I was referring to when I said "elaborate a mechanism".
> > Think of the dircolors program.  Call it with -b and it generates
> > bourne shell source, call it with -c and its output is used for any C
> > shell.
> 
> That doesn't work, since that would mean all packages that would use this
> will have to know about all shells that exist out there. And all shells
> would have to be assign a letter. Using a simple file that says what
> it's supposed to do and parse that once is possible though.

This exactly does not need to happen.

 . /etc/env contains information about variables, aliases and
   programs that have to be called when a user logs in

 . A general package knows about the syntax of various shells and
   how they issue a global profile.

 . A program update-env is invented that uses the information from
   above and creates appropriate profiles

 . env-add and env-remove are invented to serve /etc/env in order to
   give packages the possibility to install/remove entries from it.

 . All programs that use env-add / env-remove have to call update-env
   (maybe it should consitantly be called env-update) in their postinst
   and it uses the same mechanism like update-menus in order to not
   run in 10 instances.

 . All shells must know a mechanism to read and parse /etc/env and
   

> > No objections.  Except that it doesn't solve all problems.  Some
> > packages require that special programs are called when the user logs
> > in.
> 
> You mean like ssh really likes ssh-agent run?

I don't know about ssh-agent.

> > This is a different story.  Programs still have to run without that
> > environment but they may run better with a modified environment.
> 
> Some things can only be configured by environment variables, which really
> bothers my. Currently I have to set things like http_proxy, MINICOM, MANOPT
> in all shell-configs. That's annoying.

Exactly.  This is why it would be nice if we could invent such a
beas as described above.

Regards,

	Joey

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