Greg Black <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > 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.
Please reread what I wrote: "which will require manual intervention after any future upgrade once we tamper with" does not imply that the /etc/profile will be overwritten. In fact, systems like RedHat will not overwrite it on an upgrade, but will instead generate a file /etc/profile.rpmnew and will tell you in its installation log file that they did so. It then becomes your responsibility of merging the intended changes to /etc/profile in the sections provided from the distribution vendor into the file /etc/profile. Since the vendor presumably had some reason to augment his own idea of /etc/profile, you better to so in order to keep the system working as well as to be expected from a system upgraded to that version. This is manual intervention, and it is a pain. For that reason, the vendors provide directories like /etc/profile.d where you can make your own additions rather painlessly. If you decide to rather take over whole responsibility for /etc/profile, you are free to do so. But I don't see how the resulting ensuing work on each upgrade can be blamed upon the vendor, when he has clearly provided you with a sensible way to avoid it. -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
