Re: Where is the documentation for /etc/environment?

[Travis Crump <pretzalz@techhouse.org>]

Alban Browaeys wrote:
> Stephen Rueger <stephen.rueger <at> rechnerpost.org> writes:
>
>
>
> > Linux-PAM sysadmin guide, in /usr/share/doc/libpam-doc/ in the section
> > "Set/unset environment variables".
>
>
> That s a good start.
>
> But no there is no debian documentation/policy about environment/profile.
> In fact there is a "war" between maintenair about who set what (only for the
> PATH variable as far as i know).
> Thus you cannot set the PATH var in /etc/environment and expect it to be used
>  by all apps (shells, cron dameon, gdm , ... overwrite it all the time).

Debian policy 9.9:

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.

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature