[Mingw-users] /etc/profile

[LRN <lr...@gm...>]

msysCORE's default /etc/profile ends with this line:
cd "$HOME"

Would it be a good idea to make it conditional (i.e. profile only cds 
into $HOME if some convolutely-named environment variable is set to 
something non-empty)? If you want users to go into $HOME by default, you 
might as well set the right env.variable in msys.bat (which is, i think, 
what 95% of msys users run to get into msys).
cd'ing into $HOME prevents external processes (non-msys processes) from 
running msys shell in login mode (well, it doesn't really prevent that - 
but current directory changes, and if an external process passed a 
command along (it usually does), it gets executed in the wrong 
directory). Running in non-login mode is not a good option, because it 
skips /etc/profile - which means that the resulting shell doesn't have 
correct PATH, HOME, MAKE_MODE variables etc.

ALSO

Msys sets $HOME (if empty) to "/home/$LOGNAME"
Msys^Wmingw-git sets $HOME (if empty) to "$HOMEDRIVE$HOMEPATH" or (if 
that is empty or doesn't exist) to "$USERPROFILE", and then msysizes it 
by setting $HOME to "$(cd "$HOME" ; pwd)"
Personally i like the way it is in msys (/home/*/ makes it close, simple 
and easy), but msys^Wmingw-git has a point as well - if someone has 
multiple msys installations in space (i.e. simultaneously) and/or time 
(over the course of time), that someone might value the fact that the 
contents of the $HOME directory do not change from msys to msys. 
Msys^Wmingw-git also do it because they have some kind of shell 
extension that `runs git-bash from here' and requires CD to be preserved.
What do you think?

ALSO

/etc/profile is overwritten by each new msysCORE upgrade, AFAIU. How 
does one make global (per-user changes can be made with per-user shell 
config, i think) shell changes in such circumstances? Some packages 
might want to change it as well. A possible way to do that is to write 
these changes (by these packages) into /etc/profile, but make them 
conditional. I guess it depends on the nature of these changes. But 
releasing a new msysCORE version just because something in /etc/profile 
has to be changed is definitely not good.