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[Gunnar Hjalmarsson <1722151@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Olivier / Sebastien,

Olivier's conclusion when debugging bug #1662031 (comment #13), that the
simple VARIABLE=value syntax is incorrect for ~/.pam_environment,
surprised me.

My belief is that it is correct. PAM ignores syntactically incorrect
lines, and simple VARIABLE=value statements are not ignored. One of the
most used sources for user guidance is this wiki page:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EnvironmentVariables#Session-
wide_environment_variables

It tells us that the more complex syntax is required for variable
expansion to work, but the entries written to ~/.pam_environment by
accountsservice don't involve variable expansion.

Can it possibly be that messages like 'remove variable
"LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8"', which were written when debugging, simply are
informational messages which let you know the previous environment
variable - set previously somehow, e.g. from /etc/default/locale - and
which is replaced by a new one?

I admit, however, that I don't find support for my belief in the PAM man
pages.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1722151

Title:
  Incorrect syntax when writing to ~/.pam_environment

Status in accountsservice package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  While investigating bug #1662031, I found out that /usr/share
  /language-tools/save-to-pam-env writes to ~/.pam_environment using an
  incorrect syntax: "VARIABLE=value" on each line. The expected syntax
  is "VARIABLE [DEFAULT=[value]] [OVERRIDE=[value]]" (man pam_env.conf).

  ProblemType: Bug
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 17.10
  Package: accountsservice 0.6.42-0ubuntu2
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.13.0-12.13-generic 4.13.3
  Uname: Linux 4.13.0-12-generic x86_64
  NonfreeKernelModules: zfs zunicode zavl zcommon znvpair
  ApportVersion: 2.20.7-0ubuntu2
  Architecture: amd64
  CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
  Date: Mon Oct  9 06:57:17 2017
  EcryptfsInUse: Yes
  InstallationDate: Installed on 2016-07-02 (463 days ago)
  InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 16.04 LTS "Xenial Xerus" - Release amd64 (20160420.1)
  SourcePackage: accountsservice
  UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to artful on 2017-06-04 (126 days ago)

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