[Geany-devel] Missing environment variables for builds and executes

Chow Loong Jin hyperair at xxxxx
Thu Nov 25 20:44:08 UTC 2010


On Thursday 25,November,2010 03:43 PM, Lex Trotman wrote:
> On 25 November 2010 16:09, Chow Loong Jin <hyperair at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thursday 25,November,2010 03:06 AM, Enrico Tröger wrote:
>>> On Wed, 24 Nov 2010 10:15:00 +0800, Chow wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Wednesday 17,November,2010 10:40 AM, Lex Trotman wrote:
>>>>> Hi,
>>>>>
>>>>> When Geany is started from the Gnome menu it doesn't get environment
>>>>> variables set in .profile, .bashrc etc.  Other window managers seem
>>>>> ok.
>>>>>
>>>>> This means that builds don't see CFLAGS, python executes don't see
>>>>> PYTHONPATH etc :-(
>>>>>
>>>>> Although builds and executes run in shells, a non-interactive shell
>>>>> does not load any startup files.
>>>>>
>>>>> The attached patch adds the option (-l) to run the build and execute
>>>>> shells as login shells which will load startup files.
>>>>>
>>>>> Two hidden prefs build_in_login_shell and exec_in_login_shell allow
>>>>> you to disable this for builds or executes respectively if running
>>>>> your startup scripts causes some problem.
>>>>
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> I actually believe that on some distros .bashrc/.profile is sourced by
>>>> default on gdm, and on others, .xprofile is used for this purpose. I
>>>> don't think a login shell or interactive shell should be used for this
>>>> purpose though.
>>>
>>> I agree completely.
>>> If Ubuntu messed up with their system, it's their problem. Why should
>>> we fix Ubuntu's or Gnome's mistakes in Geany?
>>> In other, less harsh words, I think an applicaton should not fix the
>>> problems in the outer environment.
>>>
>>> Lex, above you said yourself, other window managers (I assume other
>>> than metacity or compiz), work ok. So, that's a pretty good argument to
>>> *not* fix it in Geany.
>>>
>>> And yes, I noticed you already solved the problem for your system :).
>>
>> This isn't a window manager problem, it's a session manager problem. Also,
>> sourcing .bash_login/.profile on GUI login is retarded behaviour,
> 
> Maybe, but how then are environment variables supposed to be set?
> Remember in this case they are for non-GUI applications invoked from
> the GUI.

Interactive shells will have their own dot files like .zshrc and .bashrc.
Non-interactive shells will inherit the environment from their parents, and
their parents will probably inherit it from the session manager, which will
source ~/.xprofile.

In order to have a single point of configuration, I'd do something like:-
cat > ~/.env <<EOF
export CFLAGS=blah
export LDFLAGS=blah
export ANYTHINGELSE=blah
EOF
echo . ~/.env >> ~/.$shellrc
echo . ~/.env >> ~/.xprofile

Then I'd just configure my environment variables in ~/.env and be happy.

I don't really see this whole issue as a problem, really. Just ~/.xprofile not
being widely known. A quick google search shows that ~/.xprofile appears to be
pretty standard across distributions, too, so Enrico, this behaviour isn't
broken or anything, it's pretty much standard. If your distribution doesn't
support ~/.xprofile, then your distribution's broken.

On the other hand, I mentioned providing a configuration interface for setting
build environment variables because I thought it might be useful if you need
different flags for different projects, rather than all of them using the same
set of flags whereby you can stuff them in some dot file.

-- 
Kind regards,
Loong Jin

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