Re: /etc/environment
On 24 Feb 1998, Guy Maor wrote:
> I'm afraid this this will cause maintainers to start having packages
> add things to there, forgetting the rule that binaries are supposed to
> work with no environment variable settings.
Exactly. Actually, I was thinking the same when I saw this proposal. So
please let me point out current policy WRT /etc/environment:
1. No program may require environment variables for getting reasonable
defaults.
2. Of course, having an /etc/environment does not conflict with #1, and
can be very useful for the local sysadmin to set global variables for her
users. But: the default /etc/environment files as provided by Debian
should be empty (or perhaps contain just comments) and no other package
may add any defines into that file.
In summary, I think the idea of providing an empty /etc/environment files
which is parsed by all our login shells is a great idea and definitely
should be implemented. But we may not use it for configuring our packages.
Thanks,
Chris
-- _,, Christian Schwarz
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