On Mon, Nov 08, 1999 at 02:44:04PM +0100, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
> On Saturday 6 November 1999, at 18 h 14, the keyboard of "Ean R . Schuessler"
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > I do understand that Debian policy discourages the concept of a
> > program requiring that an environment variable be set in order to
> > operate sanely.
>
> Note there are several reasons to do so and it may be interesting to remind
> them:
>
> - ease of use for new users (no .bashrc to edit) and for the sysadmin (there
> is no way in Unix to set a system-wide env. variable),
> - consistency between a shell into xterm ran by Gnome, a shell made after a
> telnet/rlogin or a console, which have different initialization files.
>
> > through the CLASSPATH environment variable. Stephane's solution has
> > been to essentially disable the use of this feature within the Debian
> > system.
You say there's no way in Unix to set a system-wide env variable.Still,
since this is about Debian, wouldn't it be possible to mandate in the
policy that each shell would source a common file that sets up env
variables consistently ? Is there any technical reason that this can't
or shouldn't be enforced by the policy ?
Gregor
