The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee "FESCo" this week rejected a change proposal for Fedora 45 that would use systemd's environment generator functionality for managing per-user environment variables.

The Fedora 45 proposal sought to use systemd.environment-generator for managing per-user environment variables, rather than relying on individual shellrc scripts of ~/.bashrc and friends.

[1]The proposal argued that using systemd for managing per-user environment variables would simplify per-user environment variable propagation and make environment variable changes independent of a user's default shell. Plus this change would be more friendly to those installing alternative shells like Fish or Dash.

But the FESCo committee decided to [2]reject the change. The leading concern was that this systemd.environment-generator usage could break various things in unattended ways, especially systemd-less environments like container deployments.

The proposal could be revised and re-submitted when addressing concerns over systemd-less environments and providing more configuration examples, but for now the change proposal in its current form is dead.



[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/UseSystemdForManagingPerUserEnvironmentVariables

[2] https://pagure.io/fesco/issue/3582