reassign 122817 debian-policy severity 122817 wishlist thanks On 7 Dec 2001, Javier Fernandez-Sanguino Pena wrote:
> Package: base-files > Version: 3.0 > Severity: important > Tag: patch > > First of all, I'm setting this bug as important due to the fact that, even > if it works as is some packages (bastille and user-es for example) have to do > some very nasty stuff to work properly. > > The issue here is: how do packages include/change information in the user's > environment without changing /etc/profile? Currently there is no way. The profile.d thing has been suggested several times (see the archived bugs for the base-files package) and I have always rejected it because it is against the spirit of policy when it says: 10.9 Environment variables A program must not 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 usually depends on environment variables for its configuration, the program should be changed to fall back to a reasonable default configuration if these environment variables are not present. If we followed this, no program in Debian should ever need a profile.d mechanism. My opinion is that this policy (i.e. that packages should fall back to reasonable defaults) is *good* and should not be changed. Packages "needing" a profile.d are buggy and should be changed. I'm reassigning this bug to the debian-policy package, where it really belongs.
