Comment 2 for bug 251795

This behavior has persisted in /etc/environment now for at least 3 years, with only one report of misbehavior as a result. I don't believe it's worth the effort to try to correct this now and risk getting inconsistent behavior on upgraded vs. newly-installed systems, especially as pam_env, which owns /etc/environment, *does* parse out the quotes from variable assignments.

If something else is reading /etc/environment directly, bypassing pam_env, and parsing it differently than pam_env itself does, then as Colin says, this is a bug in that component. I'm therefore reassigning this bug report to the krb5 package, as this needs to be fixed in krb5-rsh-server.