"Christian" == Christian Schwarz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > [This mail is part of Debian Policy Weekly issue #5] > > Topic 10: System-wide environment variables used for program > configuration
I agree with this Topic, but I just want to play devil's advocate a bit. > 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. My counter example here would be Oracle. That relies on environment variables even to operate at all (ORACLE_SID, ORACLE_HOME etc). I suppose what we'd have to do for misbehaving software like this is have a wrapper program around the oracle executables? > 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. Rather than "may include" you should say "no other package may alter", for clarity. FYI, and I don't think this changes anything, just FYI, the place to put system wide environment variables on debian should be /etc/environment, which is sourced by /etc/profile (or whatever is appropriate for a given shell). It is not owned by any packages, and should be considered to be owned by the sysadmin. Nor should any package touch this one. .....A. P. [EMAIL PROTECTED]<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>
