@Myself: in my description I repeatedly used "interactive shell" when I meant "login shell" instead. The distinction is important, (and thus the shell makes the distinction)--the user's .profile is only sourced in the latter case. On all other interactive shells it sources .bashrc instead. This is so that .profile can initialize the user's terminal settings, whereas this should NOT be done for all other interactive shells.
@Anders: it need not be .bashrc, and I explicitly addressed the case where your shell was not BASH. It seems you did not read the whole report. @Gunnar: So your argument is basically, "This is designed wrong, but we shouldn't fix it, because some people might have to learn the right way to do it." That is a pretty bad argument. The "mess" is that some percentage of users *might* need to modify their shell start-up files to do it the right way. That doesn't seem like much of a mess to me; it's fixing a mess. It seems clear to me that .profile and the other shell start-up files belong to the shell, and hence no program other than the shell has any business reading them. Regardless, if you don't care to fix this, what's your proposed fix for lightdm barfing on errors from terminal commands that quite rightly belong in .profile? At the very least, session start-up should not be interrupted by the fact that lightdm does this badly. That behavior is a regression, in the sense that Ubuntu 12.x did not do this until some random update somewhere between six months and a year ago, and no previous Ubuntu release did it. I have not run a pristine 14.04 Ubuntu--I've only been running it for a couple of months with all current updates applied, so I can't say whether it has or has not changed there. In the past, some distributions (including Ubuntu, if I'm not mistaken) have sourced $HOME/.profile in the system Xsession script. That solution is wrong too; but it has the nice property that if there are errors caused by the shell not running on a terminal, they are silently ignored (since there's nowhere to send them). -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to lightdm in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1468832 Title: lightdm sources .profile Status in lightdm package in Ubuntu: New Bug description: It is a bug for any display manager to read .profile--you guys are absolutely killing me with this. The user's .profile is to be read by the shell, on interactive shell (i.e. terminal) logins ONLY. The man page for bash explains this in detail; it's also discussed in the dash man page. The problem with display managers reading .profile is that it is the place where commands to set up your terminal (i.e. stty) go --this is the entire point of differentiating interactive shells from non-interactive shells, and it's the reason only interactive shells read .profile at all. Currently, if you have any such commands in your .profile, lightdm barfs on them, delaying the login session and forcing you to click on a prompt. This is extremely annoying (and wrong)! It would be satisfactory to make lightdm not display the errors, but that's the wrong solution. There's already a decades-established method of getting X display managers to source your environment settings: the .xsession file. It should be read by ALL display managers (or the session file that starts them). If you have common environment settings you want set in all your shells, the correct way to handle this is: .bashrc: # set all common environment vars here ENV_VAR=foo ... .profile: # set up terminal stty erase # BASH already sources .bashrc by default on interactive sessions .xsession: if [ -f .bashrc ] source .bashrc If you're not using BASH, you can still use this method without changing anything, except in .profile you need to explicitly source the .bashrc file. Of course you can change the name of the file that contains the common settings to reflect that your shell is not BASH; since the file is sourced by your other files explicitly, it does not matter what the user calls it. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/lightdm/+bug/1468832/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : desktop-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp