Start user shells in proper PAM sessions
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- Dominant language
- C++
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Description
**Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.**
In NixOS, we rely on PAM to set up some important environment variables, including some related to locales, via `pam_env.so`. Right now WSL starts a single non-interactive shell with `login -f` to trigger the user systemd instance, but all the interactive shells are spawned bypassing PAM, and therefore not importing the environment variables.
**Describe the solution you'd like**
WSL starts every interactive shell instance via `login` or a similar mechanism that runs PAM modules.
**Describe alternatives you've considered**
Right now we're considering wrapping the user-selected shell in a script that updates the environment manually, but this will not be correct if any other PAM modules are involved.
**Additional context**
The specific issue that led me to notice this was zsh failing to discover locales when spawned through WSL, as we require the LOCALE_ARCHIVE environment variable to be set for locale archives to be discovered.
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start by tracing WSL's interactive-shell launch path and compare it with the existing non-interactive `login -f` path. Check how PAM sessions, including `pam_env.so`, are invoked before launching the user-selected shell, and verify that locale variables such as `LOCALE_ARCHIVE` are available in zsh.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- cpp, linux, zsh
- Domain
- cli, operating-systems
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 4/5
- Estimated time
- 3-5 days
- Activity status
- Quiet
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 52/100