[Pkg-xfce-devel] Bug#752129: lightdm: Shell profile startup files not sourced on login

[Daniel Richard G.]

Package: lightdm
Version: 1.10.1-3

If you log in to Debian's Xfce desktop via lightdm, then none of the
environment variables or other settings defined in

    /etc/profile
    /etc/profile.d/*.sh
    /etc/xprofile
    $HOME/.profile
    $HOME/.xprofile

are present in the environment. You can even start up a shell in a
terminal emulator, and if the shell is non-login (as is the default),
then your shell will have no profile initializations whatsoever.

This is not the case on Xubuntu; there, lightdm wraps the call to
startxfce4 with /usr/sbin/lightdm-session, a script which contains the
following clause:

    # Load profile
    for file in "/etc/profile" "$HOME/.profile" "/etc/xprofile" "$HOME/.xprofile"; do
        if [ -f "$file" ]; then
            echo "Loading profile from $file";
            . "$file"
        fi
    done

Lightdm on Debian needs to do the above somewhere along the way.