What does the Enlightenment desktop (E17) environment variable "PANTS=ON" do?

As I'm not an active Enlightement developer, I am taking an educated guess.

On the Enlightenment developer mailing list, there are a lot of references, usually in closing, to various states of pants. These appear to be tongue in cheek references meant for humor. It seems to have been started, or at least perpetuated, by lead developer The Rasterman.

pants on! (or skirts... whatever tickles your fancy).
:)

-- 
------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" --------------
The Rasterman (Carsten Haitzler)    [email protected]

It's probably safe to assume that the environment variable is a nod to this inside developer joke.

Of course the easiest is to set PANTS=OFF and see if it has any obvious effect. If you are very curious, subscribe to the Enlightenment developer list and ask there.

Since I worked with Raster back in the late 90's I can tell you what this is about. This is a faint memory, so take this a "close enough" and not absolute truth:

One day he was working from home, but had a webcam running which I guess he kind of forgot about (probably low quality for back then), and some coworkers noticed he was working in his boxer shorts, for which everyone got a good laugh.

In e16, Michael Jennings made an epplet called E-pants which you could click on and would toggle between pants on and pants off, as a tongue in cheek reminder. The epplet did otherwise nothing useful whatsoever

While that epplet is gone in E17, the variable PANTS is likely yet another reminder of that incident, and can otherwise easily be ignored.