Re: Environment variables for Debian - XIM server and XMODIFIERS case

["Marcelo E. Magallon" <mmagallo@debian.org>]

On Mon, Sep 06, 2004 at 03:55:05AM +0900, Changwoo Ryu wrote:

 > Some offtopic: could anyone tell whether the following environment
 > variable dependency is a policy violation?  If yes, what's the way to
 > resolve it? 

 Erm...

    9.9. Environment variables
    --------------------------

         A program must not depend on environment variables to get
         reasonable defaults.  (That's because these environment
         variables would have to be set in a system-wide configuration
         file like `/etc/profile', which is not supported by all
         shells.)

         If a program usually depends on environment variables for its
         configuration, the program should be changed to fall back to a
         reasonable default configuration if these environment variables
         are not present.  If this cannot be done easily (e.g., if the
         source code of a non-free program is not available), the
         program must be replaced by a small "wrapper" shell script
         which sets the environment variables if they are not already
         defined, and calls the original program.

         Here is an example of a wrapper script for this purpose:
              #!/bin/sh
              BAR=${BAR:-/var/lib/fubar}
              export BAR
              exec /usr/lib/foo/foo "$@"

         Furthermore, as `/etc/profile' is a configuration file of the
         `base-files' package, other packages must not put any
         environment variables or other commands into that file.

 What Andrew said...

-- 
Marcelo