[Xquartz-dev] Re: 2.1.2 release candidate

[Martin Costabel]

Peter Dyballa wrote:
> 
> Am 10.01.2008 um 23:25 schrieb Martin Costabel:
> 
>> What I care about is the environment transmitted to the programs  run by
>> the Applications menu of X11.
> 
> 
> 
> It worked for you, Martin, because you had set up a reasonable  
> environment with ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist. (For next login you can  
> just rename the file.) This one was passed to the clients. And some  
> clients, like xterm, are allowed to launch with a login shell or a  
> shell like in Terminal.
> 
> Without ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist X clients have only a very  
> rudimentary environment. With some trickery you can have some success  – 
> but texdoctk will never run and work completely. This finally made  me 
> create my little suite of scripts.

No.

I don't have much time right now to do more tests, but from what I just 
did, I can see the following:

1. It never worked, even in the previous versions and in raw Loepard 
X11. "It" meaning that the programs started from the Applications menu 
get a decent environment, in particular PATH.

2. ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist does not have any influence whatsoever.

3. /usr/bin/login does not, in fact, run a login session, contrary to 
what it is supposed to do. None of the login scripts, /etc/profile, 
/etc/csh.login are executed. But /usr/bin/login, when run from the 
Applications menu, does set the PATH environment variable, to
/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/X11/bin.

4. The only way to get a decent PATH from the Applications menu is to 
set it in some non-login shell startup script like ~/.bashrc or 
~/.tcshrc. I am not willing to do this, and, frankly, I don't care. I am 
only concerned by this as someone who has spent time explaining to 
others over and over again why their programs, when started from the X11 
Applications menu, don't work correctly.

-- 
Maritn