environment (/etc/profile) and X

[Jonathan Underwood]

Dear All,

Firstly apologies if there is already perceived wisdom on this matter, 
and I've missed it despite googling fairly extensively.

I recently noticed that in FC3 in a gnome-terminal or xterm that the 
delete key didn't work and just produced a tilde. Having checked that 
the correct escape string was being returned, I realised that it was 
because /etc/inputrc was not being read and so readline wasn't set up 
correctly in bash, and that the reason for this is because INPUTRC is 
set in /etc/profile which is never read one one launches a terminal from 
within X as these start a non login shell ... it's really a 
manifestation of the fact that logging in via xdm/gdm/kdm starts a 
session which never invokes a login shell, and so /etc/profile is never 
read - opening a terminal in Gnome etc starts an interactive non-login 
shell and so /etc/bashrc and $HOME/.bashrc are read but not /etc/profile 
or $HOME/.bash_profile. At least that's my understanding.

Googling around a bit, this situation has quite a history, and there was 
even a time when /etc/profile was even sourced twice at login. This has 
been discussed at length lately by debian people here:

http://tinyurl.com/6mlw8

http://groups.google.co.uk/groups?hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&threadm=27SaO-2Hu-43%40gated-at.bofh.it&rnum=7&prev=/groups%3Fq%3Dshell%2Binitialization%2BX%2B/etc/profile%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26selm%3D27SaO-2Hu-43%2540gated-at.bofh.it%26rnum%3D7

I myself am unsure about what the right way to deal with this is, but my 
feeling is that at somepoint during login, the appropriate shell login 
file should be read i.e. /etc/profile for bash.

Thoughts?

Jonathan.