Re: problems with xfree

[Christopher Faylor <cgf at redhat dot com>]

On Thu, Jul 25, 2002 at 04:47:39PM -0400, Harold L Hunt II wrote:
>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 don't know what this "other" script in /etc/profile.d might be, but
if it is a problem for the "other" script, it could easily include
/etc/profile.d/add_x11_path (or whatever) to add the script to ensure
that the path was properly set.

So, I think that adding an appropriate file to /etc/profile.d makes
more sense.  Then people who don't have /usr/bin/X11R6 don't have
a spurious check for the directory in their /etc/profile.

cgf