Re: Environment variable documentation

["John Morrison" <john at morrison dot mine dot nu>]

On Tue, December 1, 2009 4:32 pm, Ken Brown wrote:
> On 12/1/2009 4:45 AM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>> On Nov 30 17:04, Ken Brown wrote:
>>> The discussion currently going on in the thread
>>>
>>>   http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2009-11/threads.html#00892
>>>
>>> makes me think that the section on environment variables in the
>>> user's guide (http://cygwin.com/1.7/cygwin-ug-net/setup-env.html)
>>> could use some expansion.  For example, it's not stated explicitly
>>> which Windows environment variables get imported into Cygwin (all of
>>> them?), nor is there a complete list of variables containing paths
>>
>> Yes, all of them.
>>
>>> that get converted to Unix format.  PATH, HOME, and LD_LIBRARY_PATH
>>> are mentioned, but TMPDIR, TMP, and TEMP are omitted.  I think the
>>> last three should be listed, along with the suggestion that users
>>> might want to unset them in the Cygwin environment.
>>
>> Yes, TMPDIR, TMP, and TEMP are handled the same way as PATH, HOME, and
>> LD_LIBRARY_PATH.  These six variables are the set of environment
>> variables which are subject to path conversion from Windows to POSIX and
>> vice versa.
>>
>>> I would be willing to take a stab at writing a patch if the
>>> developers think this would be useful.
>>
>> That sounds like a nice idea.
>
> OK, my patch is attached.  It anticipates the change to the default
> .bashrc file that we've been discussing in the thread cited above.

Hi Ken,

While I think it's a good idea to point out that they are (will be) unset
in the users .bashrc I'm not sure it's a good idea to tell people where
the default (/etc/defaults/etc/skel/.bashrc) is, since this will be
overwritten by the base package.  If people want to maintain their own set
of changes which is used in future that the package does not overwrite
/etc/skel/.bashrc is what they should edit.  However, since the skel files
are only copied *once* ~/.bashrc should be the first point of call.

Hope that makes sense!

J.


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