[370] in NetBSD-Development
xlogin notes
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (jhawk@MIT.EDU)
Sun Jan 8 21:04:21 1995
From: jhawk@MIT.EDU
Date: Sun, 8 Jan 1995 21:04:06 +0500
To: ghudson@MIT.EDU
Cc: netbsd-dev@MIT.EDU, yoav@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Message-Id: <199501081406.JAA01069@glacier.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.
This was I...
> 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.
I was unaware that Xsession was from a particular source tree; in
hindsight I guess that's obvious, too...
> 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.)
Hmm; I disagree with this. More specifically:
1) The path in verify.c is the one used by /usr/athena/lib/init/cshrc.
I copied it from there.
2) Some time ago, I changed /usr/athena/lib/init/cshrc's PATH to
include the sbins, as well as some other things. I'm not quite sure
why you don't think they should be there, could you expand upon that?
hier(7) says:
/sbin/ system programs and administration utilities fundamental to both
single-user and multi-user environments
and I don't thnik that ``administration utilities'' do not belong
in users' PATHs. It also says:
/usr/sbin/
system daemons & system utilities (executed by users)
And ``executed by users'' would seem to imply belonging in the PATH.
> 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.
Good point; At one point I was probably sending too much mail, and I seem
to have waned to too little...
> 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.
This change was made as part of fixing Xlogin for NetBSD. As far as I know,
its port is incomplete. It still complains about a spurious child process,
and mwm behaves oddly. Dash is also missing a few icons it uses at logout
time.
--jhawk
