On Sat 19 Apr 2025 at 11:40:52 (-0400), Greg Wooledge wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 19, 2025 at 08:12:02 -0700, pe...@easthope.ca wrote:
> > In https://wiki.debian.org/DotFiles the sixth paragraph states, "You
> > should therefore always have command source ~/.bashrc at the end of
> > your .bash_profile in order to force it to be read by a login shell."
> I don't remember exactly when Debian decided to go with ~/.profile
> instead of ~/.bash_profile but it's been a very long time. The advantage
> for you, if you're editing the wiki.debian.org page, is that you *only*
> have to worry about Debian systems, whereas I have to try to cover *all*
> Linux-based systems.
AFAICT, in version 3.2-2 April 2008, so in time for lenny as 3.2-4.
The change is described oddly:
bash (3.2-2) unstable; urgency=low
* Merge from Ubuntu:
- Remove /etc/skel/.bash_profile, if it is unmodified; if modified and
/etc/skel/.profile is unmodifed, move .bash_profile to .profile.
The filename ~/.bash_profile has still not been eliminated from the
package (README.Debian, kind of FAQ, #5). I've never made the change
to .profile, finding it convenient for all my bash initialisation
files to start with .bash…… .
Things change slowly, it seems. For example, it was requested that
the .bashrc test for interactivity be changed from PS1 to -i at about
the same time in 2008, but was not corrected until 2012, in time for
wheezy. (I don't see any report of the "bug", 482194, being
reproduced by anyone, and I didn't catch up with the change for
another nine years, as you may or may not remember.)
Cheers,
David.
