[5605] in Athena Bugs
7.0: /usr/athena/lib/init/login: DEF_TERM
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan I. Kamens)
Wed Jul 25 10:48:12 1990
Date: Wed, 25 Jul 90 10:47:53 -0400
From: "Jonathan I. Kamens" <jik@pit-manager.MIT.EDU>
To: Raeburn@MIT.Edu
Cc: bugs@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: bugs[5593]
Date: Sun, 22 Jul 90 14:34:51 -0400
From: Ken Raeburn <Raeburn@MIT.Edu>
It is silly to claim that this must be an environment variable. Why
not a shell variable? Get the clutter out of the inheritied
environment....
It is not silly, because we do not guarantee that the implementation
of the standard login files will always use DEF_TERM in the same shell
in which it was created. Since it is possible that in the future we
will want to change the implementation in a way that will require
DEF_TERM to be defined in a subshell, it must be an environment
variable, or we'll have to tell users to change their config files
based on changes they shouldn't even have to know about.
A side note: This was a conscious design decision in the original
design of the standard login files. If you want it changed, you're
going to have to go through the same design process, and convince all
the people that thought it was right that it's now wrong. If you
really want to do this, mail to athena-ws expressing your opinion on
this is usually a good way to start.
Another side-note: If you're concerned about environment clutter, than
do what I do -- create a file called ~/.unsets in your home directory,
and source it first in your .startup.X and .startup.tty files (or in
your .cshrc.mine file, if you want to be really drastic), and have it
unset the variables that you only want to be set during login.
jik
