[368] in NetBSD-Development
xlogin notes
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (ghudson@MIT.EDU)
Sun Jan 8 09:06:25 1995
From: ghudson@MIT.EDU
Date: Sun, 8 Jan 1995 09:06:12 -0500
To: netbsd-dev@MIT.EDU
Someone (probably Yoav, since they locked the file as sipbtest)
changed the default path in xlogin's verify.c to a path which did not
include the directory ".", causing the Xsession script to break, since
it runs ".xsession". Whoever it was repaired this on lola-granola by
editing /etc/athena/login/Xsession.
First, scripts are programs too, unless they're configuration scripts
like /etc/athena/rc.athena. Specifically, scripts like Xsession come
from source trees, and you should edit the script in the source tree
and reinstall rather than editing the installed script.
Second, the path chosen for verify.c included /sbin and /usr/sbin.
These don't belong in normal users' paths by default; although there
are useful programs there (unfortunately), users who want to add those
directories to their paths should do it themselves. (Of course, this
is pretty academic, since that path doesn't get used for very long.)
Third, if you make a change in /usr/athena which breaks something in
/etc/athena, at least mention it on netbsd-dev so that I can fix my
installation distribution. When we have more users, we will have to
make announcements on netbsd-announce and other allowances (for
instance, we could have had a /usr/athena/bin/.xsession for a month or
so which described the problem and told people how to upgrade their
/etc/athena/login/Xsession files) when we break things like this.
(I do plan to set things up so that people other than me can
reasonably play with and update the installation procedure, and so
that /bin/athena and /etc/athena are kept somewhere more public and
referenced by a Makefile in the athena-install directory. Right now
I'm tied up by the Linux IAP class, though.)
