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.

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 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.