[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Christian Schwarz) wrote on 13.01.98 in <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> 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.
If program foo expects the environment variable BAR=/var/lib/fubar, an
easy way to make it comply to this policy is to rename foo to foo-real,
and write a wrapper shell script
#! /bin/sh
BAR=/var/lib/fubar
foo-real "$@"
[I hope I got that right!]
NOTE: This may not work if the program decides what to do based on the
name it is called with. Fortunately, this is rare.
MfG Kai
