Feature discussion - startup files

[Chet Ramey]

I've been approached by some HPC system administrators (who have the
unenviable task of supporting thousands of users) who have requested a
new feature in bash: a system startup file with a fixed name (e.g.,
/etc/bashenv) that is sourced by every instance of bash.  The initial
request was for something sourced by every interactive shell, but the
presence of batch systems in the HPC environments prompted the request
for this kind of startup file for non-interactive shells as well.

The current configurable startup file options are insufficient for their
purposes because they can be enabled or disabled by vendors, and these
folks would rather not modify the "vendor" parts of the system.  In some
cases, with some Linux distributions, doing so voids their support.

My position is that a feature like this is not popular enough to be made
the default, and the way to move forward and make something like it
available is to make it a configurable option.  The standard way to do
that is to make it an option in config-top.h, but it could be settable
using configure.

I'm interested in hearing what other folks think about the issue, and
the shell configuration challenges system administrators face in general.

Chet
-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, ITS, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/