I recently filed a bug report (80092) against the nmh package regarding the location of its program files. It installs files into /usr/bin/mh, which isn't in the path, making running the program difficult until the reason is found.
A suggestion was made by the maintainer to file a report against base-files to add that to the default path, but I then realized a more serious problem. If, according to policy, no package is allowed to modify environment variables, how should any package make the needed change? Furthermore, doesn't this violate the policy (in the same section) that no program can require an environment variable to be changed in order to be run? One could argue that the program can still be run by including the full path (/usr/bin/mh/foo), this seems to be an unnecessary complication and something that should be added as an amendment to this policy. Another problem I noticed is that, should base-files actually add /usr/bin/mh to the default path, how would this change affect those who have already installed the base system? Would this overwrite users' modified profiles? This is actually my first post to a Debian list, and I was unsure of which list this should go to. If it belongs on debian-policy alone and not debian-devel, please respond only on the former. Jon Eisenstein
