[Pkg-xfce-devel] Bug#752129: Bug#752129: lightdm: Shell profile startup files not sourced on login

[Daniel Richard G.]

On Fri, 2014 Jun 20 10:38+0200, Yves-Alexis Perez wrote:
>
> Check the first line of /etc/profile:
>
> # /etc/profile: system-wide .profile file for the Bourne shell (sh(1))
> # and Bourne compatible shells (bash(1), ksh(1), ash(1), ...).
>
> There's absolutely no reason to use that outside of bash. If you want
> to setup environment variable inside your session, use ~/.xsessionrc.

There is ample precedent for doing this, as the X login session has long
been regarded as analogous to a terminal login session, but for the
initial login shell not being interactive. You may disagree with how
things have been done elsewhere/previously, but "absolutely no reason"
is an overstatement.

~/.xsessionrc is an option, but it is not present by default, and it is
not reasonable to require the user to create this file in order for
~/.profile et al. to take effect in an X session. If I log in to X as a
new user on a new Debian system, and I have a ~/bin dir, and I open a
shell, that dir should be prepended to my PATH (see /etc/skel/.profile)
without my having to touch a config file to make it so.

As you're not willing to address the issue here, I've filed a new bug
against x11-common:

    https://bugs.debian.org/752192

There are a couple ways to go about this, one of which would be
distributing a default /etc/skel/.xsessionrc file that does the sourcing
(so the user isn't required to create this file to get the expected
behavior).