Date: Wed, 02 Jul 1997 15:43:02 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: hoek@hwcn.org Cc: Annelise Anderson <andrsn@andrsn.stanford.edu>, Francisco Reyes <francisco@natserv.com>, FreeBSD Chat List <chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Why Not Make tcsh the default shell? Message-ID: <16549.867883382@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 02 Jul 1997 18:14:22 EDT." <Pine.GSO.3.96.970702175830.28963B-100000@james.freenet.hamilton.on.ca>
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> Perhaps the 10% that it _does_ help is more valuable to the > FreeBSD project (as users, that is) than the 90% that it doesn't > help. But as a group of people who are trying to be professional OS "vendors", that is simply not our determination to make. Like family, one does not choose one's customers (as much as one would often like to, in both cases). Now the techno-elitist, of which there are many in the UNIX world, will always look at this classic problem and say "change the user", whereas the product-realist says "accomodate the user, if possible, since negative user feedback actually indicates _our_ failure." I am a realist, and I say that if people aren't reading the docs then we simply have to make the installation process less reliant on such doc-reading prerequisites. The old adage about leading a horse to water comes to mind here, and even the techno-elitist will agree that in designing any complex system, a good engineer attempts to avoid putting undue strain on the weaker areas of it or what's being built will probably only fall down. This goes for everything from bridges to large software systems, and in the latter case it's typically the user which is the weakest component of all. Jordan
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