Nicolas Williams wrote: > Could you clarify something? Just what exactly is a non-starter? > Mucking with the user's PATH without asking them? (I hope so!) > Or is any PATH management tool out of the question as well? > > I.e., can we build a GUI tool that can manage users' PATH settings?
And how is such a GUI tool going to deal with users with .cshrc files that say "source /local/projects/stdenv.cshrc"? Or some other file not owned by the user? Where the latter sets the path in some hard-coded way. Whichever way you look at this, you're back to the problem of "if a user sets an explicit path somewhere in the bowels of .cshrc, writing a general purpose GUI to fix this is problematic." > And if we can, can it be invoked on first login, on first login after > update, after patch? Not everyone has a plain .cshrc all of their own, without standard setups. In fact, most people on a large project probably source a standard file from somewhere else. (Don't ON developers do this?). > Because I could see a voluntary PATH management tool as useful. Perhaps. > Of course, because shell dot files are scripts whose flow control we > could not analyze in such a tool, such a tool would be limited to users > whose shell dot files adhere to some conventions (which the account > skeleton's would). Exactly the point above. Which prevents this being a robust solution. Hugh.
