Before systemd, EnvironmentFile often have "export" line. Ex in /etc/sysconfig/sshd export SSH_USE_STRONG_RNG=0 Often sysadmin add such variable in /etc/sysconfig/httpd, p.e. export SOMEVAR=foo This syntaxe is silently ignored by systemd Of course, the right syntax is SOMEVAR=foo It will be great if systemd could accepts the "export" syntax.
On my system there's only one occurrence of "export" among the 70 files in /etc/sysconfig/ and that's the sshd. The line is not ignored. It actually does add the string "export SSH_USE_STRONG_RNG=0" into the environment. Of course this is not what anyone wants. We should refuse to add keys with spaces (or other weird chars) and report errors. Now as to whether to support the "export" syntax explicitly... I dislike the idea. It would add to the illusion that environment files are shell scripts, which they're not.
Yes, we should validate the key name, and refuse lines with whitespace and any non-printable characters. Right, 'export' is a shell command; we do not want to make it look like systemd understands shell, hence do not want to support or ignore 'export'.
Bah, systemd still does not honor "export FOO=bar" for EnvironmentFile...
Systemd does not understand shell specific syntax, and it should not pretend it does. Closing as WONTFIX.
I disagree and we will happly discuss this from the Enterprise perspective of being a Red Hat partner and customer once this systemd stuff enters RHEL.