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7020100
(Get the code!)
@Myself: in my description I repeatedly used "interactive shell" when I meant "login shell" instead. The distinction is important, (and thus the shell makes the distinction)--the user's .profile is only sourced in the latter case. On all other interactive shells it sources .bashrc instead. This is so that .profile can initialize the user's terminal settings, whereas this should NOT be done for all other interactive shells.
@Anders: it need not be .bashrc, and I explicitly addressed the case where your shell was not BASH. It seems you did not read the whole report.
@Gunnar: So your argument is basically, "This is designed wrong, but we shouldn't fix it, because some people might have to learn the right way to do it." That is a pretty bad argument. The "mess" is that some percentage of users *might* need to modify their shell start-up files to do it the right way. That doesn't seem like much of a mess to me; it's fixing a mess.
It seems clear to me that .profile and the other shell start-up files belong to the shell, and hence no program other than the shell has any business reading them. Regardless, if you don't care to fix this, what's your proposed fix for lightdm barfing on errors from terminal commands that quite rightly belong in .profile? At the very least, session start-up should not be interrupted by the fact that lightdm does this badly. That behavior is a regression, in the sense that Ubuntu 12.x did not do this until some random update somewhere between six months and a year ago, and no previous Ubuntu release did it. I have not run a pristine 14.04 Ubuntu--I've only been running it for a couple of months with all current updates applied, so I can't say whether it has or has not changed there.
In the past, some distributions (including Ubuntu, if I'm not mistaken) have sourced $HOME/.profile in the system Xsession script. That solution is wrong too; but it has the nice property that if there are errors caused by the shell not running on a terminal, they are silently ignored (since there's nowhere to send them).