Where to set user specific environments?

[Andrew Conkling]

On 6/28/06, Hadmut Danisch <hadmut at danisch.de> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 28, 2006 at 03:22:57PM +0200, Nikolas Arend wrote:
> > On startup, xfce runs /etc/xdg/xfce4/xinitrc (if there's no
> > xinitrc in ~/.config/xfce/). I'm not sure what exactly you're trying to
> > do, but copying /etc/xdg/xfce4/xinitrc to ~/.config/xfce/ and doing your
> > modifications in there might be what you're looking for.
>
> That would probably work, but would be an ugly workaround, not a
> solution.
>
> - It highly depends on the distribution and the xfce version. You'd
>   have to continuously change and update that file

Where did you get this information?  This directory has been used
since 4.2, which has been out for almost 18 months.  Any distro that
obfuscates the use of that file isn't worth using, IMO.

> - You can't have one account to login to machines with different
>   versions of xfce or different distributions.

You probably shouldn't be running 4.0 next to 4.2, sure.  (It may be
possible, but I'm not spending any thought on that.)  However, you
probably wouldn't want to do that with any program/environment.

> - It moves things into the users reponsibility which don't belong there

Then modify the global xinitrc to do this work.  You are asking for a
file in someone's HOME directory, so that is still in the realm of
"user responsibility," no?

> - It would work with xfce only. I'd prefer a file which works with any
>   kind of login, like ssh, console, fvwm, gnome, kde, xfce. Thus, no
>   desktop-specific things are to be included.

Then why are you asking here?  For general login prompts, I second the
suggestion to use the shell's files or some other global file that
every user would load.

> What needs to be done is something like
>
> if [ -e $HOME/.xfcerc ]; then
> . $HOME/.xfcerc
> fi
>
>
> and then you can put things like
>
> umask 027
> limit coredumpsize
> export FOOBAR=something
>
>
> into that file.

So why not do that?

Cheers,
Andrew