activation environment

[navi-desu]

to ease writing init scripts that depend on environments from other services, ideally we'd have a way for scripts and users to set variables that would be automatically exported to some value.

current design i have in mind includes two new features, a new env action for depend(), and a new env command for rc-update.

the depend keyword would write a new service option env, so we'd end up with /run/openrc/options/$RC_SVCNAME/env. only the activation environments of services you depend on would be exported.

the rc-update command would instead append /run/openrc/env, which would be loaded by all services unconditionally

so, as an example, dbus' script could be have:

conf.d/dbus

export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS="${XDG_RUNTIME_DIR}/bus"

init.d/dbus

depend() {
    env DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS
}

then any service doing depend() { need dbus; } would automatically get the variable in their env.

likewise, a user could in their wayland compositor configuration, do:

rc-update --user env WAYLAND_DISPLAY
openrc --user gui

---

considerations:

currently we have no sort of activation environment, but we filter the environment variables from the process calling us, with rc_env_allow in rc.conf. should we automatically export such allowed variables to the activation env? currently the wayland example works fine without needing any env command by just allowing the display variable.

runlevel specific env files?

[navi-desu]

tracking PR #782

[fauust]

Hi, this seems needed indeed, see: https://lists.alpinelinux.org/~alpine/users/%3CaEGb5j6aR8tEKWz6%40falared%3E