David Kastrup wrote: | Ok, that settles .profile. Now why is your advice bad, bad, bad for | the system-wide configuration, as well? Because we nowadays have | Linux distributions that can be upgraded. And /etc/profile is sure to | be under the control of the upgrade process which will require manual | intervention after any future upgrade once we tamper with | /etc/profile.
Any such system is utterly broken. It's all very well to provide a default /etc/profile for a new installation, but it's completely wrong to overwrite such a file on an upgrade. It's there for the system admin to populate as she wishes and no upgrade has any business playing with it.
