Re: Another possible slink goal (multipackages users profile)
> It seems like each person who tells me what we're talking about
> has a different idea of what we're talking about.
I think that's a reasonable assessment.
> The system administrator already has all the necessary tools to force
> whatever he wants on the users as they log in. This discussion was
> started on the premise that we needed a way for package authors to
> set environmental variables because their packages needed them.
There are several different issues here. One is the "Debian shouldn't
be making those sorts of decisions for me" argument which is akin to
the debate over ip-up.d (which, it seemed to me from examing a
hamm box, was never really solved).
Another seems to be "the system administrator shouldn't be making these
sorts of decisions for me," which is only relevant in specific cases,
and only to an extent which is largely beyond the scope of a technical
discussion.
> At the moment, I do not agree with that initial premise, nor do I agree
> with the many variations on the theme that have been presented as "what
> everyone else is saying".
Allow me then to diverge from the thread by presenting what I, and no one
else, is saying.
Each shell--assuming for the moment that we agree on what a shell is for
the purposes of this discussion--reads a script or set of scripts upon
invocation. Commonly this amounts to the setting of environment values
such as PATH, assigning a default umask, changing key bindings, playing
with the terminal type, setting limits, and perhaps running a program
or three.
Currently, if the system administrator wants to make a change in shell
startup behavior, he has to modify the startup scripts of every shell
that is used on the system.
For instance, if I wish to make it so that upon execution of a login
shell, "find /" is invoked from a wrapper which traps and ignores all
signals--and the fact that it would be ridiculous to do this is
irrelevant--I would have to edit /etc/profile by hand. I would also
have to add the line to /etc/csh.login, and /etc/zlogin or /etc/zprofile,
and so on. Additionally, if I had sillysh installed on my system,
which requires all commands to be encapsulated within ten consecutive
ampersands, I would have to edit /etc/sillyrc and (after learning
the syntax, probably) add the line there.
I would much prefer to put "run findscript" in
/etc/shell.startup.script.mechanism/login/087rootfind
and run update-shell.startup.scripts and be done with it.
It's also possible that someone who uses a lot of different shells
may want the same functionality on a user-level and could take
advantage of a local version.
Whether or not packages are to install such heinous modifications by
default, this is still a convenience to which I see no downside if
implemented properly.
and
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