From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4 Description of problem: Graphical sessions (gnome-session) should not depend on users preferences. a bad PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH or LANG makes things unstable. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Be a new user (with no root privileges) with a virgin home directory 2.Create a lib directory in your home (or wherever else) 3.Do this following stupid thing : cp /lib/libasound.so.2 ~/lib/libc.so.6 4.put this in your .cshrc setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH ~/lib (or export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=~/lib in your .bashrc) 5. Try to log-on Actual Results: Of course , gnome won't start. Expected Results: Environment should start even if, obviously, almost everything you will next try to run in a terminal won't work. Additional info: sessions are runned this way : -/bin/tcsh -c /usr/bin/dbus-launch --exit-with-session /etc/X11/xinit/Xclients So it will source .cshrc before running it (and then use the stupid LD_LIBRARY_PATH) I know it has advantages : session take cares of users preferences. Another solution would be to be sure that EVERY library and EVERY binaries have RPATH set to /lib:/usr/lib : but that's not the case in Fedora i386. In a developper's environment (where I work), I can't oblige check every PATH nor LD_LIBRARY_PATH
Changing this could potentially break similar system-level customizations, which would be worse. I think the safer answer is just not to break your local configuration in that way.
It was of course an extreme example. But there is more vicious one. ( some things like /opt/Devel/mywork/xml/lib in the LD_LIBRARY_PATH). We have dozens of developpers there which are constaintly changing their LD_LIBRARY_PATH/PATH,LC_ALL and so one. I can't be sure everybody has not forgot to put /lib:/usr/lib before anything else in the LIBRARY_PATH They perfectly accept having troubles running applications from command line (in gnome terminal). But they really don't understand why it causes sytem crash or freeze. Mainly come from Solaris/CDE and they simply don't understand. No, I repeat myself , but the stability of the system MUST NOT depend of users preferences (variables set).