Bug 798477

Summary:	The switch desktop tool breaks our login environment
Product:	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5	Reporter:	damion hancock <damion.c.hancock>
Component:	switchdesk	Assignee:	Than Ngo <than>
Status:	CLOSED NOTABUG	QA Contact:	Desktop QE <desktop-qa-list>
Severity:	low	Docs Contact:
Priority:	unspecified
Version:	5.7	CC:	pknirsch, vbenes
Target Milestone:	rc
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	x86_64
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:	switchdesk-4.0.8-8.el5	Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2012-05-21 14:48:51 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description damion hancock 2012-02-29 00:34:59 UTC

Description of problem:
We set the shell variable 'p' to locate our parts library.  However, when the switch desktop tool is run it drops ~/.Xclient-default that allows a custom desktop environment.   However, it uses 'p' to find a valid path and resets this variable to something like /usr/bin.  This means any application launched from the Redhat menu has an invaild $p setting.  

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):


How reproducible:
It happens everytime you use the desktop switch tool


Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Use the deskop switch tool
2.  Log out
3.  Login
4.  Launch an application from the menu that assumes $p is set.
  
Actual results:
$p is set to /usr/bin

Expected results:
$p should be set to the variable set in the custom login scripts.


Additional info:

The easy way we fix this is by replacing 
exec $p/WM
from the .Xclients-default with
exec -l $SHELL -c "$p/WM"

Comment 2 Than Ngo 2012-04-25 14:54:41 UTC

the variable p which is using in .Xclients-default is not exported, so it cannot overwrite the variable set in in the customscript.

I tried to to reproduce the problem with adding this line "echo p=$p >/tmp/startkde.out" in /usr/bin/starkde", and switchdesk kde before. The variable p is empty which is expected.  

Could you please give more details how i can reproduce this issue?

thanks

Comment 4 damion hancock 2012-05-02 16:00:40 UTC

Your test sounds like it should reproduce the error.   I tried to repeat it myself, but it seemed to work.  We have gotten a few patches since I originally posted this.  I also just got a newly configured workstation, so I won't be able to look at this again for a while.

I assumed that the exec command didn't need to export the environment but just replaced the calling shell with the $p/WM argument taking the current shell environment.

Comment 5 Than Ngo 2012-05-14 11:22:37 UTC

The created .Xclients-default script doesn't export any enviroments on unix standard. To export the enviroments you need to set "export XXX". 

I will close this bug as "NOTABUG" in this case.