From: Benjamin Kaduk [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Tuesday, July 15, 2014 7:24 PM
To: [email protected]
Cc: Bryan Drewery; [email protected]; [email protected];
[email protected]
Subject: Re: svn commit: r268641 - head/usr.sbin/service
On Tue, Jul 15, 2014 at 10:13 PM, <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]> > wrote:
Blatting out the environment feels rude and non-UNIXy.
UNIX programs can, and should expect at a minimum to
be able to interrogate the environment they are running
within -- destroying all vestiges of that environment purely
for the sake of saying "it's clean" seems counter to the
UNIX pathos.
I'm not sure I can square this sense of "non-UNIXy" with the long-standing
documented behavior of cron to only set SHELL, PATH, LOGNAME, and HOME. Surely
cron is Unixy...
[Devin Teske]
Last time I checked, cron did not define the UNIX standard.
That is to say, that simply because cron decides to export
those exact 4 variables does not mean that all of UNIX
should never export any other variable.
I define non-UNIXy as chicanery that makes working in a
POSIX environment more difficult. In this particular case,
the issue is that should I want to find out what type of
terminal my *terminal* program is running on, I shouldn't
have to fight the system to determine the answer. Rather,
the system should (unless it has damn-good reason) freely
offer information that divulges what environment the
program is running in.
I am not making the argument that boot-scripts should
have access to every environment variable in the parent
namespace, but I am arguing that standard UNIX idioms
such as $TERM _should_ be provided (not providing them
is imho non-UNIX like).
--
Devin
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