Ubuntu
xorg package

TMPDIR set not respected when login to a graphical environment

Bug #59177 reported by sean finney
4
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
xorg (Ubuntu)
Fix Released
Low
Unassigned

Bug Description

Binary package hint: gnome-session

if you put

export TMPDIR
TMPDIR=/home/sean/tmp

in ~/.gnomerc, or even just before the call to "exec" in
/etc/X11/Xsession.d/99xorg-common_start, TMPDIR will not be set for any applications launched by gnome-session.

as superficial as this might sound, it causes a nasty problem on my system if
a user sets TMPDIR in their .gnomerc/.bashrc/etc files. you get some gnome cruft
 in /tmp, and other cruft in ~/tmp. while i'm not knowledgable enough to know the full ramifications of this, i do know for a fact that it causes evolution to crash if using the evolution-scalix plugin (it took me the better part of an afternoon to track this down). i'm not sure *why* it's crashing, but if i replace "evolution" with "env TMPDIR=/home/sean/tmp evolution" in the launcher button, the problem goes away.

through an afternoon's trial and error debugging, i've determined that the culprit is indeed gnome-session. any other environment variable set using the documented method (.gnomerc or 99xorg_common_start) is preserved in programs executed by gnome-session, but TMPDIR mysteriously disappears.

Revision history for this message
Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

Thank you for your bug. The behaviour is the same when starting wmaker with startx from a VT, that is not due to GNOME, reassigning to xorg

Bryce Harrington (bryce)
Changed in xorg:
importance: Undecided → Low
status: New → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton) wrote :

Fixed in hardy. Put the variable in ~/.xsessionrc.

xorg (1:7.3+9) unstable; urgency=low
.
.
  * Add support for $HOME/.xsessionrc. Closes: #411639
    This file, if present, will get sourced during the start of your X
    session. This allows you to set session-wide environment variables easily
    for things like locale information. Patch adapted from one by Yves-Alexis
    Perez. Thanks also to Holger Levsen and Osamu Aoki for advice.
    + Adds 40x11-common_xsessionrc to /etc/X11/Xsession.d
    + Document this in Xsession.5 manpage
    + Add a NEWS.Debian entry about it
    + Modifies /etc/X11/Xsession to declare the location of ~/.xsessionrc.
      Custom versions of Xsession (like gdm's) will need an update

Changed in xorg:
status: Confirmed → Fix Released
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