Bug#133578: gdm bug #133578. Intend to NMU.

[Mathieu Roy]

Wouter Verhelst <wouter@grep.be> wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 20, 2004 at 02:52:08PM -0300, Daniel Ruoso wrote:
>> Em Seg, 2004-04-19 ās 16:03, Ryan Murray escreveu:
>> > No patch that involves doing anything with the PAM login-time configuration
>> > file /etc/environment is going to be applied by me.
>> 
>> Ok, you mean I must do a NMU? or this mean I must go to the next step,
>> that would be the tech-ctte?
>
> (guessing here; Ryan did not give much information)
>
> I think what Ryan means is that /etc/environment is a file used to set
> environment variables from within PAM; and that, in his opinion, it is a
> bad idea to start using that file to store a bunch of system-wide
> settings from things that have nothing to do with PAM, since that's not
> what it's meant for.

Is it specific to Debian (or to GNU/Linux)? 

At
<http://lists.debian.org/debian-glibc/2004/debian-glibc-200401/msg00278.html>
there's an interesting overview of the issue in Debian.

But, still, if I had to define /etc/environment before reading that
mail, I would have talked about something more like this description
about the /etc/environment file in AIX: 
<http://publibn.boulder.ibm.com/doc_link/en_US/a_doc_lib/files/aixfiles/environment.htm> 
("The /etc/environment file contains variables specifying the basic
environment for all processes. ")

As a matter of fact, here my /etc/environment contains only
LANG=fr_FR@euro.

Since when /etc/environment is tightly linked to PAM? And why? The
name /etc/environment is of a very large scope, it is hard to consider
it a good name if it is just limited to PAM stuff. With such a name,
you're almost forced to think about `man environ` which one talk about
user _environment_. 

Regards,




-- 
Mathieu Roy

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