On 24/10/99 Darren Benham wrote:
Each shell (potentially) has a different syntax for setting environment variables. I know bash and tcsh are different. A seperate /etc/profile.d /etc/login.d /etc/cshrc.d directory for each shell would be ridiculous as would a seperate file in one directory for each shell by each package that had envirnment variables. For one, that would require the package maintainer to know the syntax for all possible shells.
besides that, I can tell you that redhat's profile.d concoction can and does result in screwed up environment that is not too easy to straighten out... just one example that annoys me on my old redhat box, my PATH variable never reflects what is in the /etc/profile, not even close the order is screwed up and there are */sbin directories that i do not want in normal user environments, changing the PATH by way of /etc/profile no longer will do what I want if I need to modify the global PATH...
trying to figure out what this mess is really doing to the environment is a convoluted pain.
I would rather be told exactly what the program needs in who's environment and then leave it up to me to decide the best way to implement it, rather then be told nothing and end up with a screwed up environment that is hard to fix without breaking everything...
Best Regards, Ethan Benson To obtain my PGP key: http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/pgp/