Comment 11 for bug 306331

OK, my bad. One standard thing I do on my machines is add the following line near the top of /etc/profile:
PATH=~/bin:$PATH

And that puts everything I want in my path. This may also be accomplished by putting this line in ~/.profile, depending on your shell.

Setting this in .bashrc does not work because login shells don't read rc files, they read profile files. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_shell#Configuration_files_for_shells

I suggest the user try setting PATH in a profile file instead of an rc file.