[Summary] gdm bug#133578

[Daniel Ruoso <daniel@ruoso.com>]

As the discussion proceeds, I think it would be interesting to
reorganize the ideas, so I'll try to make a summary of the points raised
until now (please correct me if I misunderstood,  misinterpretated, or
even forgot something)...

I think we got two points here:

1) There is a bug standing for more than two years. There is a patch
that, in the worst case, is a workaround for this bug. This workaround
(or fix) doesn't breaks anything (at least at this moment, nobody
pointed a specific problem). As no other fix was provided until now, the
request is to fix the bug with the given patch.

I couldn't find the arguments against this question, except Ryan Murray
that said "No patch that involves doing anything with the PAM login-time
configuration file /etc/environment is going to be applied by me."
(sorry, but I have no time right now to search the history URL, but it
is in this thread at Apr 19)

2) The file /etc/environment can be a "public interface for user
environment variables" (Sam Hartman, Apr 23, (again sorry for the
missing URL)) and I couldn't find where it is defined as a "PAM
login-time configuration file". It *is* read by pam_env module, but
that's all. And it is the only place where the System's Default Locale
is saved (see locales postinst). So I don't see why /etc/environment
couldn't be parsed in init scripts.

The argument against this point is that /etc/environment *is* a "user
session" configuration file, and, as init scripts aren't inside a "user
session", it must not be parsed. The default locale should be saved in
other file that could be parsed inside init scripts. There is another
option that differs system's default locale of user's default locale
(but I didn't read much about this, it's in the bug history,  I think).



let's move on, this discussion seems constructive...

daniel