Comment 2 for bug 1800280

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Axel Beckert (xtaran) wrote : Re: [Bug 1800280] [NEW] Setting ZSH as the default shell causes various issues because it doesn't source /etc/profile

Hi Martin,

Martin wrote:
> When setting ZSH as the default shell, /etc/profile is never sourced

What do you exactly mean by "setting ZSH as the default shell"?

A) Using it as login shell for a specific user.
B) Letting the /bin/sh symlink point to it.

Case B is definitely not supported and explicitly discouraged by
upstream.

> /etc/profile.d/apps-bin-path.sh adds /var/lib/snapd/desktop to
> XDG_DATA_DIRS. Setting the default shell to ZSH means that desktop
> environments suddenly can't launch snap packages.

This sounds more like case B to me.

> Arch Linux's zsh package has `emulate sh -c 'source /etc/profile'` in
> /etc/zsh/zprofile. Either Ubuntu's zsh package should do the same (or
> something similar), or Ubuntu must put important environment variable
> stuff somewhere else and have only bash-specific stuff in /etc/profile
> and /etc/profile.d.

IMHO the latter needs to happen. Zsh upstream does not source
/etc/profile and users won't expect it to do that and doing it will
probably cause other user irritations and unexcpected subtle side
effects.

See https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article25/shrc for reference what
each shell loads in which case.

  Regards, Axel
--
 ,''`. | Axel Beckert <email address hidden>, https://people.debian.org/~abe/
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