Package: bash Version: 3.2-4 Severity: wishlist There's nothing in /etc/skel/.profile about setting environment variables. Now that dash is /bin/sh, it's worth trying to do this nicely.
I make the following suggestion; I welcome improvements. In my ~/.profile, I have at the top: # Specify environment ENV=$HOME/.shvars; export ENV BASH_ENV=$ENV; export BASH_ENV and at the bottom: # Load environment variables if [ -n "$ENV" ]; then . "$ENV"; fi The placing of these lines is so far fairly arbitrary; the only important point in my setup is that the sourcing of $ENV is done at the bottom because my .shvars modifies $PATH. Proper treatment of this depends on a fix for bug #379696, which I don't presume to address here. These changes achieve the following thing (with a bit more documentation, which I'd be happy to write if the changes were adopted): 1. Give the user an obvious place to set environment variables. I would also add /etc/skel/.shvars, containing some comments pointing out that you need to use POSIX syntax, i.e. 'FOO="bar"; export FOO' rather than 'export FOO="bar"'. 2. Make the environment variables available to all /bin/sh and /bin/bash scripts (via BASH_ENV and ENV). The main problem I foresee is that users might want different sets of variables available in interactive from non-interactive sessions. Hence, it might be better to recommend two variables files, say ~/.shvars and ~/.shvars_interactive, where ~/.shvars_interactive includes and overrides ~/.shvars (this way round seems more useful to me than the other way around, though either would work) and set ENV and BASH_ENV to ~/.shvars as above, but source ~/.shvars_interactive instead. But maybe this is an unnecessary complexity. (I certainly don't have a need for it at present.) I just spent some time working all this out to get environment variables working nicely in GNOME without having manually to load an environment anywhere, so I suspect that something of this sort could save other users time, as well as promoting good practice. -- System Information: Debian Release: 5.0.4 APT prefers stable APT policy: (500, 'stable') Architecture: i386 (i686) Kernel: Linux 2.6.26-2-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core) Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash Versions of packages bash depends on: ii base-files 5lenny5 Debian base system miscellaneous f ii debianutils 2.30 Miscellaneous utilities specific t ii libc6 2.7-18lenny2 GNU C Library: Shared libraries ii libncurses5 5.7+20081213-1 shared libraries for terminal hand Versions of packages bash recommends: ii bash-completion 20080705 programmable completion for the ba Versions of packages bash suggests: pn bash-doc <none> (no description available) -- no debconf information -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
