Re: profile.d [was Re: UMASK 002 or 022?]
robbe@orcus.priv.at (Robert Bihlmeyer) writes:
> it's not. Quite a few applications rely on envvars set to the right
> value, man being only one of them.
Applications may rely on environment variables to *customize*; however,
it is a violation of Debian policy for applications to require
environment variables to work. If you had been around for the previous
discussions (er, flamewars) on this subject, you would be aware of this.
Customization is the job of the local system administrator, who should
have no trouble editing /etc/profile.
> How is MANATH different from CVSROOT? What's the problem with setting
> the latter in /etc/profile?
Debian's man works fine without any MANATH at all (at least, it does on
my system). Can you think of an example where a package would need to
modify the MANATH? I cannot. Of course, the system administrator may
wish to modify the MANATH for his (or her) own purposes, but not a
package.
> > as far as dealing with changing a variable like say PATH in one file
> > why not juse use pam_env or /etc/environment?
>
> That's perfectly fine for admins to edit. But packages can't.
Packages should not *need* to set environment variables. All
applications in a package should work correctly, by default, without
requiring *any* environment variables to be set. Therefore, no package
should need to set an environment variable.
- Brian
Reply to: