[Pkg-xfce-devel] Bug#761330: XFCE doesn't source my ~/.profile at login

[Samuel Bronson]

Package: xfce4-utils
Version: 4.8.3-2
Severity: important
File: /usr/bin/startxfce4

Dear Maintainer,

I'm not really sure if this is a bug in startxfce4 or in lightdm, but
when I start XFCE on a freshly-installed system, /etc/profile and
~/.profile are not sourced and, well, neither is anything else (if I'm
reading this correctly).

If you think this is really lightdm's responsibility, see
<https://bugs.debian.org/636108>, which was wontfixed and closed ages
ago.  (I'm not certain what other DEs/DMs do, though it sounds like it
varies a lot from distro to distro.)

There does appear to be provision to edit or totally replace
/etc/xdg/xfce4/xinitrc, but it seems like that'd be a pain to maintain ...

Is it too much to ask for a reasonable, plausibly DE/DM-independant
place to put some shell script to set up my enviroment variables
whether I log in graphically or not?  (It's no big deal if it doesn't
actually work for all DEs/DMs *yet*; more important is that it be
reasonable to ask for this to be *fixed*.  It's also no big deal if
e.g. logging in at the console and then running "startxfce4" ends up
running the code again even though the environment variables are
already set up.)

Anyway, at the moment /etc/profile and ~/.profile would seem to be the
closest thing we've got to such a place:

 * It's reported to work in more than one DM/DE combo:
   + kdm/KDE
   + gdm/GNOME

On the other hand, there always seem to be people who complain
whenever a DM or DE starts sourcing the profile, so it might be better
to get XDG to specify a file that should get sourced during graphical
login, and I could just arrange for that to source the profiles ...

[Honestly, I feel like I should be reporting this against "all DEs" or
something like that, but I don't think there's a way to do that.  I
was tempted to send it to CTTE due to its general nature, but it's
pretty clear they aren't intended as a venue of first resort.]

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 7.6
  APT prefers stable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages xfce4-utils depends on:
ii  dpkg                                  1.16.15
ii  exo-utils                             0.6.2-5
ii  libc6                                 2.13-38+deb7u4
ii  libdbus-1-3                           1.6.8-1+deb7u3
ii  libdbus-glib-1-2                      0.100.2-1
ii  libglib2.0-0                          2.33.12+really2.32.4-5
ii  libgtk2.0-0                           2.24.10-2
ii  libxfce4ui-1-0                        4.8.1-1
ii  libxfce4util4                         4.8.2-1
ii  procps                                1:3.3.3-3
ii  x11-xserver-utils                     7.7~3
ii  xfce4-terminal [x-terminal-emulator]  0.4.8-1+b1
ii  xinit                                 1.3.2-1
ii  xterm [x-terminal-emulator]           278-4

Versions of packages xfce4-utils recommends:
ii  dbus-x11       1.6.8-1+deb7u3
ii  thunar         1.2.3-4+b1
ii  xdg-user-dirs  0.14-1
ii  xfce4-panel    4.8.6-4
ii  xfwm4          4.8.3-2
ii  xinput         1.6.0-1
ii  xscreensaver   5.15-3

Versions of packages xfce4-utils suggests:
ii  xfce4-session  4.8.3-3

-- no debconf information