Re: problems with XFree

[Harold L Hunt II <huntharo at msu dot edu>]

Let me see if I understand what is going on here:

We are debeating whether to:

1) Modify /etc/profile, which is not installed via a package, but is 
created directly by setup.exe.

2) Add two scripts, one for bash-style shells and one for c-shell-style 
 shells to /etc/profile.d/.  These scripts are processed by 
/etc/profile.  We would add this new scripts to an XFree86 package, 
probably XFree86-bin, and we would install these scripts via a 
post-install script if they were not already present (so we do not 
overwrite modifications).

Of all the arguments for/against the two methods, so far only one seems 
to be a sticking point that essentially decides how we will do this:

  There is no guarantee that the sub-script in /etc/profile.d/ that 
adds /usr/X11R6/bin to the path will be executed before some other shell 
script, that may be added at a later date to /etc/profile.d/, that 
requires that the path to the X11R6 binaries already be set.  In order 
to allow other scripts in /etc/profile.d/ to assume that the path to the 
X11R6 binaries is known, we must set the path to the binaries in 
/etc/profile before the /etc/profile.d/ scripts are processed.

I therefore throw my vote 100% behind modifying the /etc/profile script 
to add /usr/X11R6/bin to the path, if that directory exists.

Robert Collins had said something about pulling the /etc/profile script 
out of setup.exe and having it installed as a stand-alone package.  Was 
this the task that two people had volunteered for?  If so, shall we wait 
until this package is made before we propose any changes to 
/etc/profile, or should we go ahead and submit a patch for the 
/etc/profile that is distributed with setup.exe now?

Hopefully I haven't confused anything here.  I have not commented until 
now because I had no idea what was going on with all of this profile[.d] 
stuff, but I think I have a pretty good grasp of it now.

Harold

Jehan wrote:
> Nicholas Wourms wrote:
>
> > As a rule of thumb, packages should *never* modify the /etc/profile
> > script (even if you do back it up).  This is a big no-no, as most
> > *nix people would tell you.  If you insist on getting into a
> > discussion on why this is, then so be it.  Instead, create 2 scripts
> > (a csh and a sh) and drop them into the /etc/profile.d/ directory. 
>
> I don't like modifying /etc/profile either because I don't think there 
> any clean way to do it. But if you read the thread I summarized, someone 
> said that Unixes set X path in /etc/profile. And this make sense to me: 
> there are no guarantees on the order of execution of the scripts in 
> /etc/profile.d. What if one of them looks for X and doesn't find it 
> because the path has not yet been set? As you said in our heated thread 
> last time, X is quite an important package and we will have more and 
> more package depending on it.
> If the 2 scripts in profile.d are preferred, then I already sent them 
> less than two weeks ago.
>
> > This way we play it safe and every one is happy.  Also, your scripts
> > should check to see if the path has already been set, if it has, then
> > don't set it again.  Remeber, the more entries in the path, the
> > slower Cygwin will operate.
>
> If you read the scripts carefully, you'll see that I do check if the 
> path exists. I check in the install script if /etc/profile has a line of 
> the form "...PATH=.../usr/X11R6/bin...".  Sure it doesn't handle every 
> single cases (what if someone uses a temporary variable). But it should 
> handle 99.99% of the cases. If such a line is already in /etc/profile, I 
> don't change it.
> I also check the path in /etc/profile script itself using the echo/grep 
> line.
>
>     Jehan