[aklug] Re: What happened to /etc/profile?

Debian adheres to the DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) principle whenever it
can. When a bunch of shells need access to a well known constant like
PATH, and the chances of it deviating outside of the users dotfiles is
close to nill, it's consolidated.
The login package in Debian and other dists takes care of setting
variables. The shell nearly always runs the login program (I believe,
correct me if I'm wrong). I'm sure you can think of a billion reasons
why this makes things easier to administrate as a distribution as well
as possibly more secure and less "revealing" to the dumber of the
malicious scripts out there.

AFAIK all shells use /etc/profile, but some use it a bit differently, so
maybe that's why login is responsible for the more important vars as well.

Damien Hull wrote:
> There's a section on the LPI test about the bash shell. It covers config files, login, logout, variables etc... I checked my own /etc/profile to find something very strange. There's no PATH variable.
>
> It turns out this is a wacky Debian thing. I'm on Ubuntu and it inherits wacky things from Debian. The PATH variable is in /etc/login.defs. Why does Debian do wacky things like this?
>
> Unless other distributions are doing the same thing. All my systems are running Ubuntu.
>

-- Attached file included as plaintext by Ecartis --
-- File: signature.asc
-- Desc: OpenPGP digital signature

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iEYEARECAAYFAkl4r/AACgkQXK/vGhypreJdUQCcCyw3DQ87bT6/yhn0t3IigNfj
NSEAnRkwjhy8WZIBGYstKHeWPCXiKTwY
=tQN6
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

---------
To unsubscribe, send email to <aklug-request@aklug.org>
with 'unsubscribe' in the message body.
Received on Thu Jan 22 08:42:20 2009