Re: Environment Script System
On Mon, Aug 11, 2003 at 11:32:16PM -0500, Jerry Haltom wrote:
> I was curious if anybody has brought up the question of an environmental
> script system in Debian yet? Such a system would make adding
> environmental variables to a user's login sequence with a Debian package
> much easier. A few other distros do this same thing. I am not trying to
> copy features from distros, but presenting the idea on it's own merits.
>
> Such a system would or could consist of a directory /etc/env.d or
> otherwise named that would contain scripts to be executed in order by a
> user's default login profile. The update-alternatives system could be
> used to substitute scripts for specific packages.
Debian packages must not depend on environment variables to function
properly. We've been saying that in policy for years, with a rationale.
As a result, complex systems of setting environment variables should not
be necessary.
> A perfect example of the usability of this idea can be seen with setting
> up a Java environment on Debian. Debian Java policy already contains a
> number of ways for using alternatives to set the different available
> executables from different competiting JVMs, and this would allow
> alternatives to be used to manage the required Java environmental
> variables.
If Java requires magic environment variables, it should be fixed, by
writing wrapper scripts if necessary.
> I'd like to know if anybody else has any opinions on this? Such a system
> would be extremely easy to implement. It could be done simply by editing
> /etc/environment to loop through each file, and including
> /etc/environment by default in bash_profile or other shell login
> scripts. A max of 5 lines.
Not everyone uses bash. For that matter, not everyone even uses a
Bourne-style shell as their login shell. Also, /etc/environment is not
available for such use; it's read by the pam_env module, which is not
prepared for it to contain anything more than simple KEY=VALUE lines.
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
Reply to: