[sclug] shell profiles and Gnome

[Simon Heywood]

This came out of what I thought was a simple move to change the umask
from 022 to 002 on my new desktop box (running Debian Sarge).  I can
empathise with the reasoning behind sticking with a default of 022, but
that's no good if it's so difficult to change consistently.

I uncommented the umask line in the (/etc/skel) provided ~/.bash_profile
script, setting the parameter to 002.  While this works well when I
login via a virtual console, it doesn't work in a gnome-terminal,
instead using the system default of 022.

Now I know that by default gnome-terminal doesn't run bash with the
--login option, but I would've expected Gnome to already have seen
~/.bash_profile, what with it being a login environment itself.
Perhaps this is misguided, because Gnome should be independent of the
user shell (a post to debian-user [1] suggests that ~/.gnomerc is the
relevant location), but then you'd have to copy the other stuff to there
(like the user binary path code) from ~/.bash_profile.

Furthermore, if I change the default umask in /etc/login.defs and
/etc/profile, Gnome still won't pick it up.

I suppose what I want to know is why Gnome doesn't have a login
environment consistent with bash, such that things like umask are the
same whether you're creating a file with Vim over SSH or with a text
editor in Gnome.  If it helps, I'm running gdm (the Sarge default).

Any suggestions?

S.

[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2001/12/msg00497.html