Re: xsrc/54851 (.profile is not read by sh when using xdm or other login managers)

[nia <nia%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

The following reply was made to PR xsrc/54851; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: nia <nia%NetBSD.org@localhost>
To: gnats-bugs%netbsd.org@localhost
Cc: 
Subject: Re: xsrc/54851 (.profile is not read by sh when using xdm or other
 login managers)
Date: Wed, 17 Aug 2022 22:01:40 +0000

 On Tue, Aug 16, 2022 at 12:05:02PM +0000, Valery Ushakov wrote:
 >  That fix (sourcing ~/.profile from Xsession) seems pretty suspicious
 >  to me, if not outright wrong.  I haven't used xdm in a small eternity,
 >  but xdm provides the resources to customize this and we set the
 >  defaults for them in src/external/mit/xorg/bin/xdm/Makefile The PATH
 >  is set in userEnv in xsrc/external/mit/xdm/dist/greeter/verify.c
 >  
 >  So the real problem is that we have xdm defaults that miss the
 >  directories that the system default path (sysctl user.cs_path /
 >  getconf PATH) actually does have.
 >  
 >  xdm comes from the era when NFS-shared home in a heterogenous
 >  environment were quite common, so the same ~/.profile would be
 >  interpreted on SunOS, Ultrix, SVR3 and what not.  And these systems
 >  had their own path quirks: X's own bin location (X11R[45], I don't
 >  remember if I had anything with R3; cf. X11R[67] we had in NetBSD),
 >  /usr/ucb, /usr/xpg4, /usr/gnu was quite common, etc.  That machine's
 >  xdm would take care to set up system's idea of the default path for
 >  you that included those systems-specific things.
 >  
 >  So the machinery for this is all in place and working around our own
 >  wrong xdm defaults by sourcing a random user's script that in the big
 >  scheme of things should not hardcode system-specific PATH pecularities
 >  - is not the right thing to do.
 
 Reducing the problem down to just the PATH seems to be Missing The
 Point slightly. It's also about locales, editing modes, etc.
 
 Without ~/.profile read on startup, the default shell is pretty
 unusable regardless of PATH settings.
 
 I'm not sure what you mean by random user - it sources the ~/.profile
 from the user who has just logged in. Nothing is read before login.