[This mail is part of Debian Policy Weekly issue #5]
Topic 10: System-wide environment variables used for program configuration
STATE: APPROVAL
It has been unwritten policy for a long time now, that no package may use
system-wide environment variables for configuration of its programs. (The
reason for this is that not all shells parse /etc/profile.)
To document this policy, I'll add the following text to the Policy Manual,
unless someone objects.
No program may depend on environment variables to get reasonable
defaults. (That's because these environment variables would have
to be set in a system-wide configuration file like /etc/profile,
which is not supported by all shells.)
If a program should depend on environment variables for its
configuration, the program has to be changed to fall back to a
reasonable default configuration if these environment variables
are not present.
Furthermore, as /etc/profile is a configuration file of the bash
package, no other package may include any environment variables or
other commands in that file.
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