System-wide env. variable (Was: RFC: An alternative to /usr/share/java/repository

[Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@pasteur.fr>]

On Monday 8 November 1999, at 17 h 26, the keyboard of 
flight@mathi.uni-heidelberg.de wrote:

> You say there's no way in Unix to set a system-wide env variable.Still,
> since this is about Debian, wouldn't it be possible to mandate in the
> policy that each shell would source a common file that sets up env
> variables consistently ?

It means several files to maintain, at least one for bash/zsh, one for tcsh 
and its friends and one for purely-Posix shells like ash.

And these files are not always sourced, for instance when you run a command 
from a window manager menu...