Setting PATH with environment.d does not work on debian

[rumpelsepp]

Submission type

• Bug report
• Request for enhancement (RFE)

systemd version the issue has been seen with

233; debian version: 233-10

Used distribution

Debian Testing

In case of bug report: Expected behaviour you didn't see

I have this content in my ~/.config/environment.d/99-defaults.conf:

GOPATH=$HOME/Go
PATH1=$GOPATH/bin:$HOME/.cargo/bin:$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH
PATH=$GOPATH/bin:$HOME/.cargo/bin:$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH

After a login in gnome3 I expect to see $PATH and $PATH1 to be equal;; with expanded $GOPATH prepended.

In case of bug report: Unexpected behaviour you saw

On a shell I get this instead:

$ printenv PATH PATH1 GOPATH
/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/local/games:/usr/games
/home/stefan/Go/bin:/home/stefan/.cargo/bin:/home/stefan/.local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin
/home/stefan/Go

$ systemctl --user show-environment
...
GOPATH=/home/stefan/Go
PATH1=/home/stefan/Go/bin:/home/stefan/.cargo/bin:/home/stefan/.local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/u
PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/local/games:/usr/games
...

In case of bug report: Steps to reproduce the problem

Create that file from above, relogin to gnome, open a terminal and type printenv.

$PATH seems to be hardcoded somewhere which overwrites my setting; important fact: I use gnome on wayland. So I have no shellscripts that are being exectued during login.

[rumpelsepp]

Maybe it's debian specific. I close this until we know.

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=869144

[rumpelsepp]

As requested from bugs.debian, I reopened this.

[poettering]

/cc @keszybz

[AlexanderKurtz]

I am also seeing this problem on Debian Buster (GNOME 3.22, systemd v234) when using a GNOME Wayland session. I am not yet entirely sure what's causing this, but I currently suspect the following:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=736660

This is a bug where people complained that since Wayland doesn't run the session through a login shell, some of the configuration files used by login shells (~/.profile, ~/.bash_profile, etc.) are obviously not read anymore.

https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-session/commit/?id=5e36cd63e71520f829bbd77c102b64179e08992a

This was the fix for the bug mentioned above, it comes down to running the login shell in gnome-session if Wayland is used.

https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-session/tree/gnome-session/gnome-session.in

This is the current version of the gnome-session shell script. There are some changes, but it seems the scripts still tries to launch a login shell to restore the expected behaviour on Wayland.

http://sources.debian.net/src/base-files/10/share/profile

This is what Debian installs in /etc/profile per default. As you can see, this will statically set PATH to a value depending on the effective UID.

As I said, I haven't tracked this down entirely, but I wanted to share my preliminary findings here.

[fsateler]

@rumpelsepp What is the output of running /usr/lib/systemd/user-environment-generators/30-systemd-environment-d-generator ? It prints correctly for me. Also, what is the output of systemctl --user show-environment?

[rumpelsepp]

The generator itsellf prints the environment correctly. The output of the other command is listed in the original post.

[rumpelsepp]

@AlexanderKurtz nailed it. It is indeed a debian problem.

The relevant commit in gnome is this: https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-session/commit/gnome-session/gnome-session.in?id=7e307f8ddb91db5d4051c4c792519a660ba67f35

So, in gnome wayland there is a login shell which sources the well known files in order to set up environment variables and do some initialization stuff. The debian provided /etc/profile overwrites my environment.d settings. My personal fix is, to write my environment definitions in ~/.profile. To sum up, not a systemd problem AFAIC.

[poettering]

OK, closing then. Thanks for tracking this down.

[njam]

I think this might be caused by this gdm bug (on GNOME 3.36): https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gdm/-/issues/385