Comment 2 for bug 1722151

Hi Olivier / Sebastien,

Olivier's conclusion when debugging bug #1662031 (comment #13), that the simple VARIABLE=value syntax is incorrect for ~/.pam_environment, surprised me.

My belief is that it is correct. PAM ignores syntactically incorrect lines, and simple VARIABLE=value statements are not ignored. One of the most used sources for user guidance is this wiki page:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EnvironmentVariables#Session-wide_environment_variables

It tells us that the more complex syntax is required for variable expansion to work, but the entries written to ~/.pam_environment by accountsservice don't involve variable expansion.

Can it possibly be that messages like 'remove variable "LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8"', which were written when debugging, simply are informational messages which let you know the previous environment variable - set previously somehow, e.g. from /etc/default/locale - and which is replaced by a new one?

I admit, however, that I don't find support for my belief in the PAM man pages.