startup, .profile, env.vars., etc.

[Ryo Furue]

Hi KDE users,

I think this question comes up from time to time:  When and how are
environmental variables set?  How are users supposed to set their own?

Last time I asked this question, I eventually found that if you make a
symbolic link in ~/.kde/env/ to your ~/.profile (or ~/.bash_profile)
and add an extension ".sh" to the link name, then it's sourced during
the KDE startup.  Good.

But, today I realized that without a link in ~/.kde/env/ , my
~/.bash_profile is somehow sourced.  My system is the testing
distribution of Debian, which is constantly updated, and KDE has
been updated for a few times since I set ~/.kde/env/ , I think.
Does that mean that KDE now sources the user's ~/.profile ?

Since I first found that in konsole, I thought that my bash was invoked
as a login shell.  But, no; the value of $0 was "/usr/bin/bash" or
something similar, not "-bash".   Also I examined the env.vars. of
/usr/bin/ssh-agent, which is invoked by ssh-add, which is in turn
invoked from ~/.kde/Autostart/ , and sure enough, its
env.vars. contained my own ones set in my .bash_profile.

Curiously, the env.vars. of kwin don't include mine.  So, there are
some KDE programs that don't get my env.vars.

This leads to another annoyance: I have launcher icons on my panels.
I set one of them to invoke "emacs" and hoped that it would invoke
/usr/local/bin/emacs because that's the first one in my PATH.  But,
it invokes /usr/bin/emacs instead.  That probably means that the
program that manages the panels (I don't know its name) doesn't get
my env.vars.

So, I'd like to know, once and for all, how these things work.  What
should I read?

Cheers,
Ryo
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