proper place to set environment variables?

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Mon, 2014-05-12 at 17:26 -0700, John Gabriele wrote:
> I tried creating a ~/.xsessionrc, then put this in it:
> 
>     export PATH=$HOME/bin:$HOME/.cabal/bin:$PATH
>     export TERM=xterm-256color
> 
> logout, login, and then found that `echo $PATH` shows the expected
> PATH (with ~/bin and ~/.cabal/bin in it), but `echo $TERM` returns
> just "xterm". (?!)

So seemingly after ~/.xsessionrc is processed, something else does set
TERM too. Perhaps something else does it always, or it's a race
condition. IOW there's no universal "proper place" to set variables.
What's the right place depends on how you set up your install, or what
distro specific defaults you're using and especially what variable you
want to set, for what usage.