Re: change an environment variable in a running gnome session

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Tue, 2005-08-02 at 15:40 +0000, Nate Nielsen wrote:
> We run into the same problem with seahorse and running an agent for GPG.
> 
> It needs an environment variable set in the distribution but short of
> getting distros to set it on login, or asking users to go muck with
> their init scripts, there's really no way to set it.
> 
> DBUS solves this by setting the environment variables and then having it
> launch the session. However this really only works for one app per
> desktop, and again requires that distros get in on the environment
> variable action.

Colin is right that D-BUS is intended to be the only app that does this,
because D-BUS is in turn the "grounding point" for the rest of the
desktop and apps. In other words once we bootstrap D-BUS you can use
D-BUS to locate other apps, communicate between apps, and find config
settings. (gconf is the place for config settings now but the idea is
that we'd eventually route this through dbus also)

If you're talking about an env variable that command line gpg looks at
then that's a little tougher to deal with.

Anyway, people should know not to copy D-BUS since the way it works is a
one-time special case needed because D-BUS can't use D-BUS to launch
itself.

Havoc