Dear all, I am trying to set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable during the login process on a per user basis in Debian stretch. According to the documentation here https://wiki.debian.org/EnvironmentVariables, it should be enough to set the environment variable in $HOME/.profile.
And this really works flawlessly for non-graphical logins. The first bad thing that I had to realize is that for graphical logins, .profile is just not read. As it seems, one has to source .profile in a (Debian- specific) file which is called $HOME/.xsessionrc to ensure that .profile is read during graphical logins. Is it really expected behaviour that by default, all setting in .profile are ignored for graphical logins whereas they are evaluated for non-grahical ones? But sadly, the story for setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH on a per-user basis does not end here. And this leads me to my actual question: Once I source $HOME/.profile from $HOME/.xsessionrc and login graphically, all variables that I define within $HOME/.profile are set as expected _except_ LD_LIBRARY_PATH. It seems that someone clears exactly this variable (on purpose?) without caring at all about its content. After some hours of trial-and-error, I finally gave up. Has anyone else encountered this problem and knows a solution? I do not even know which package to raise a bug report against... It might be related to a similar discussion on Ubuntu: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13428910/how-to-set-the-environment al-variable-ld-library-path-in-linux I believe there are very good reasons to allow different users to adjust the LD_LIBRARY_PATH according to their build environments and local libraries. Why this variable is handled in such an exceptional way only when logging in graphically, is hard to explain, I believe. Any hints or help is highly appreciated. Best regards, Martin
