[gobolinux-devel] env vars in /etc/zprofile instead of zshrc

[Michael Homer]

On Tue, Apr 1, 2008 at 5:39 PM, Jonas Karlsson <jonka750 at student.liu.se> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 01 Apr 2008 05:37:39 +0200, Hisham <hisham.hm at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  > On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 9:23 PM, Jonatan Liljedahl <lijon at kymatica.com> wrote:
>  >>
>  >> Hisham wrote:
>  >>  > On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 8:44 PM, Jonatan Liljedahl <lijon at kymatica.com> wrote:
>  >>  >>  At least mine *does* read zprofile in interactive shells: I put echo
>  >>  >>  lines at the end of my .zshrc and .zprofile and when I now launch an
>  >>  >>  xterm -ls I get this:
>  >>  >>
>  >>  >>  reading .zprofile
>  >>  >>  reading .zshrc
>  >>  >>  lijon at Kymatix ~]
>  >>  >
>  >>  > Yes, but -ls turn on "login shell", so that's why .zprofile was read, isn't it?
>  >>
>  >>  Yes, of course. I now see the confusion, what I was arguing against was
>  >>  the idea that interactive login shells didn't read zprofile, but perhaps
>  >>  nobody was saying this... :)
I think that was it, yeah - shells can be any combination of login/not
login and interactive/noninteractive, so shells that are both login
and interactive *do* source zprofile.
>  >>  An interactive non-login shell wouldn't read zprofile, that's right. But
>  >>  I'm having a hard time seeing why you would need environment variables
>  >>  without beeing logged in. And how often do you use an interactive
>  >>  non-login shell that is not started from another login shell, and need
>  >>  the env variables? "Display manager straight into X" (without login) is
>  >>  not something you would want, since the env variables wouldn't be there
>  >>  and many things wouldn't work. regardless if they are set in zprofile or
>  >>  zshrc. (zshrc is *not* always read, only on interactive shells, which a
>  >>  display manager login shell is not.
>  >>
>  >>  This thread is starting to get ridiculous.. :)
>  >
>  > No, this thread is not ridiculous -- esac is! :)
>  >
>  > Getting this kind of shell stuff 100% right is complicated business
>  > and threads like this are valuable because each participant brings
>  > different aspects of knowledge to the table.
>  >
>  >>  All I want is that login
>  >>  shells should have the proper env vars set, regardless of whether the
>  >>  shell is interactive (text prompt) or not.
>  >
>  > It's fair. I too find it hard to imagine a shell running that didn't
>  > have any (grand^n for n >= 0)-parent process that was a login shell.
>  >
>  > My suggestion: how about this? (pseudo-shell ahead: )
>  >
>  > zprofile:
>  > export ZPROFILE_SET=1
>  > # export PATH and other env vars...
>  >
>  > zshrc:
>  > if [ ! "$ZPROFILE_SET" = "1" ]
>  > then
>  >    source zprofile
>  > fi
>  > # other interactive shell stuff: prompt style, completion, etc.
>  >
>  > I think this should make everyone happy, no?
>  >
>  Atually, I think a solution was given in the zsh user's guide posted
>  earlier:
>
>  * So, at the absolute least, you should probably surround any option
>  * settings in /etc/zshenv with
>  *   if [[ ! -o norcs ]]; then
>  *     ... <commands to run if NO_RCS is not set,
>  *          such as setting options> ...
>  *   fi
I prefer Hisham's way: it's less processing and less error-prone. The
[[ -o norcs ]] test is more meant for setting shell options
(SH_WORD_SPLIT, say), which a script might want to know are in their
default state. There are a lot of subshells opened all the time that
have to parse zshenv. Only interactive shells will need to do any
extra processing at all this way.

The skeleton ~/.zshrc will have to source ~/.zprofile as well.
-Michael