[7712] in testers
Re: My Athena session will not run.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (ghudson@MIT.EDU)
Thu Sep 18 18:25:13 2008
Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2008 18:24:15 -0400 (EDT)
From: ghudson@MIT.EDU
Message-Id: <200809182224.m8IMOFqd029673@outgoing.mit.edu>
To: Greg Hudson <ghudson@mit.edu>
CC: William Cattey <wdc@mit.edu>, testers@mit.edu, athena10@mit.edu
In-reply-to: <1221749389.7130.84.camel@error-messages.mit.edu>
Okay, mystery solved.
1. Bill had a .tcshrc file. In Athena 9.4, we have a local
modification to tcsh which causes .tcshrc to be executed in addition
to, rather than instead of, .cshrc, but that's gone in Athena 10. So
.cshrc wasn't getting run. We should document this.
2. Bill has a .path file. The handling of .path files in the Athena
10 cshrc is buggy, and caused the "set: Variable name must begin with
a letter" message. I've committed a fix.
3. xsession.tcsh explicitly sources .cshrc, which bypasses (1) and
runs into (2), crashing the session.
4. At some point during testing, Bill chose the "gnome session", as
opposed to the default. For non-default sessions, we don't execute
xsession.tcsh, so the session did not crash out. It turns out picking
a different session is sticky (saved in ~/.dmrc), so he was able to
continue to bypass (2) for subsequent logins. (Not running the Athena
xsession wrapper is fairly subtle; you don't get the gmotd, zephyr
isn't started, your environment setup happens in each terminal instead
of once globally, and the "logout" alias won't work, but none of those
particularly jump out.)
