Re: Login Shell/Profile: Stop the Madness
Tim Connors said:
> Christian Riedel <sarek@nurfuerspam.de> said on Thu, 17 Jun 2004 18:28:54
> +0200:
>> Hi,
>>
>> On 17.06.2004 15:40, Freivald, Joseph A, GVSOL wrote:
>> > /etc/X11/Xsession.d > cat 98login-shell-settings
>> > # Debian specific environment settings
>> > source /etc/environment
>> > # Global settings just like for login shells
>> > source /etc/profile
>>
>> This does the job quite well. And people who dont want a login-shell
>> when starting X simply dont install the script.
>>
>> In my oppinion this should comfort both sides.
Conceptually though this is a hack. It doesn't source ~/.bash_profile and
you cannot add it or non-bash shells will attempt to source it. The
correct fix is to change the file:
/etc/X11/Xsession.d/99xfree86-common_start
to read:
exec -l $SHELL -c "$STARTUP"
That way the initial environment is delegated to the user's default shell.
> Although, I hope you never do this on a machine you sysadmin where you
> have other people using it.
>
> I have to contend with a stupid SuSE system at work where the
> /etc/profile* scripts are so absolutely full of cruft
Well we're not talking about SuSE. Debian /etc/profile set's PATH and PS1
and that's it.
> (and cruft that
> actually sets undesirable behaviour in some thing - I think the LESS
> environment variable was set to something about 80 columns long) that
> they take quite some time to execute. Not only that, they don't care
> about overriding variables that are already set -- I start up my
> xterms with bash as a login shell
Then it's ironic that you complain about inefficencies in /etc/profile
because starting all of your xterm's as login shells will source the
/etc/profile and ~/.bash_profile every single time whereas doing it once
when you actually *login* will allow all shells to simply inherit what was
already set.
> The correct place to put in all of this cruft that not everybody will
> want is in the skeleton directory, so they can remove or edit the
> files once they are installed in their home direcory. I tried to
> suggest this to SuSE, but alas my bugreport of course went completely
> unnoticed.
And with good reason. A good sysadmin doesn't force the responsibility of
administering the system to the users. Anything like JAVA_HOME,
http_proxy, etc belongs in /etc/profile or on SuSE /etc/profile.local.
Mike
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