GNOME, Wayland, and environment variables

Posted Jan 5, 2017 12:57 UTC (Thu) by callegar (guest, #16148)
Parent article: GNOME, Wayland, and environment variables

I expect that the sole effect of this and other breakage of behavior/expectations is that it will slow significantly the Wayland adoption, by making it much harder to try Wayland and alternate its usage with X11, without providing any tangible benefit capable of compensating the cost of delayed adoption. Add that to the fact that X11 is still "good enough" to many users and usage scenarios, and that one major distro has a competing approach (btw, is there a login shell in it?) and be prepared to huge huge fragmentation ahead.

GNOME, Wayland, and environment variables

Posted Jan 5, 2017 17:06 UTC (Thu) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link] (2 responses)

I think that anyone who cares deeply about their environment variables as defined in customized shell profiles has already found one of the four or five ways to solve the problem in Wayland. It isn't particularly difficult, so I take a very small exception to your phrase "making it much harder"

GNOME, Wayland, and environment variables

Posted Jan 6, 2017 8:39 UTC (Fri) by muep (subscriber, #86754) [Link] (1 responses)

I kind of care about those, but since the X11 session is still easily available and the situation for Wayland sessions seems to be kind of complicated and changing, I am just using the X11 session for now. I might pretty quickly switch to the Wayland one, though, if I come across a mechanism for setting environment variables that fulfills these requirements:

Works with many GNU/Linux distributions. At the very least, these:
- CentOS
- Debian
- Fedora
- Ubuntu

Works with at least all of these sessions:
- Local virtual terminal
- Local X11 session
- Local Wayland session
- Remote SSH session

Works with many ways of launching applications:
- From terminal emulator
- From desktop environment launchers

The traditional way of using ${HOME}/.profile allows me to have a single file that I can reuse on various kinds of hosts. Currently it fills all of the above, except (unless my impression is outdated) Wayland sessions. If I am to switch mechanisms, it sounds like a bad deal to lose any of those other use cases just to get the Wayland use case that currently behaves almost identically to the X11 one.

But if someone can suggest a workaround that gets me all of the above with a single place to maintain common environment variables for multiple hosts I use, I'd be happy to try out the Wayland session again.

GNOME, Wayland, and environment variables

Posted Jan 6, 2017 21:51 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

It'd be pretty easy to set up a systemd user service which reads a key/value file and set environment variables in the systemd session. The wayland.target could then Requires= and After= it. And .profile could do the same in shell code.

Personally, I have units for different environment variables that get pulled in by the relevant services and then I dump the systemd --user environment to a shell script which I then source after logging in over SSH to get access to my session's environment. It'd be possible to also just have .bashrc or whatever do that work as well for SSH.

But that's assuming that Wayland is triggered through a systemd unit and not a direct startx analogue (I've converted by setup to a systemd --user session, but login managers don't use it properly, so I log in on a TTY).