Hello Gunnar, just discussed on IRC, but for the records..
Gunnar Hjalmarsson [2013-12-13 5:59 +0100]: > ~/.pam_environment > /etc/environment These are fine from my POV. They aren't shell scripts, so they are "safer" in the sense that it's hard to get unintended side effects in there. > /etc/default/locale This should be taken off the page. This is explicitly not the place to set arbitrary environment variables. > Personally I don't find any of them optimal. As regards > ~/.pam_environment and /etc/default/locale, they are written to > automatically when people set their languages and locales via the GUIs, > so there is a risk that manual entries are accidentally overwritten. That would be a bug in accounts-service & friends though. The PAM ones have a rather simple line format, so it isn't hard to change existing ones, and the code goes through some effort to not overwrite user settings and keep the format nice. > I tend to think that these files are preferred when you need to > manipulate environment variables manually: > > ~/.profile - for user specific settings > /etc/profile - for system wide settings As Oliver said, /etc/profile.d/ is better. /etc/profile is maintained by packages (although not as conffile) and it's already quite complex, so it's easy for users to break it. > I'm about to edit > https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EnvironmentVariables, but before > doing so, and since this is an area where established practice > should be taken into consideration, I'd appreciate some input here > before doing so. Many thanks! Keeping docs up to date is indeed very important and appreciated. Martin -- Martin Pitt | http://www.piware.de Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com) | Debian Developer (www.debian.org) -- ubuntu-devel mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel
