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Date:      Fri, 8 Sep 2000 11:15:54 +0200
From:      Neil Blakey-Milner <nbm@mithrandr.moria.org>
To:        "Eric P. Scott" <eps@sirius.com>
Cc:        freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: NO_TCSH issue
Message-ID:  <20000908111554.A52410@mithrandr.moria.org>
In-Reply-To: <200009080254.TAA52210@mail1.sirius.com>; from eps@sirius.com on Thu, Sep 07, 2000 at 07:54:17PM -0700
References:  <200009080254.TAA52210@mail1.sirius.com>

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On Thu 2000-09-07 (19:54), Eric P. Scott wrote:
> csh is my interactive shell of choice, and tcsh is just different
> enough to cause serious transition shock.

What exact transition problems have you experienced?  I'm sure if you
actually contributed a list of changes, I can generate a csh.cshrc for
all the old-timers who want it to work "exactly the way it always did".
I could change the source so it acted the way you want, and yet we can
provide an excellent UI to users of FreeBSD for only 300k!

>  What's wrong with small, simple, and functional?

Nothing.  That's one of the reasons 44bsd-csh was kept.

> Why do I need 609K of feature bloat when a 279K executable does
> everything I want?

Everything _you_ want.  Heck, I could do without all those aliases.
Let's remove alias support from csh in FreeBSD!  I don't even use csh,
let's remove it totally!

> Consider also that we're talking about the default shell for root
> here; the most conservative choice minimizes the possibility of
> unpleasant surprises.  If I'm called in to perform disaster
> recovery on someone else's server--or worse, asked to perform
> telephone support--the last thing I want to trip over is some
> junior sysadmin wannabe's customized .tcshrc that screws up
> everything even more.

And how does this differ from some junior sysadmin wannabe's customized
.cshrc?  If he's a junior sysadmin wannabe, you're going to have to tell
him to type 'csh' anyway.  Now just tell him to type 'csh -f', and it
won't do any 'l33t K-r4d ~/.tcshrc reading.

> But I stand by my opinion that replacing csh with tcsh in 4.1-RELEASE
> was the single most ill-conceived action taken by the committers.

Well.  Firstly, this wasn't an action taken in a void by the evil
committers who do everything behind the backs of the users.  This was
brought up on 6 April on a public forum, and the concensus was that it
was worthwhile.

Now, yet again, if you have a problem with the way things work when csh
is invoked as 'csh', then report it, and don't bring it up arbitrarily
on a mailing list.  If you report it, we can fix it.  It can function
again the way you like.  If you don't report it, then you don't get to
complain.

> I expect to continue recommending 3.5.1-RELEASE for all new
> installations where it's hardware-compatible.  (Why, oh why,
> wasn't Adaptec 29160 support back-ported?)

That's your decision.  If you think the 300k hit is too big, and you
can't be bothered to use the 44bsd-csh package, and you don't appreciate
the fact we now have a _maintained_ csh-compatible csh with a UI that
non-guru's can use, and you can't take the time to actually report your
problems to the proper forums at all, and you're willing to live without
numerous improvements and optimizations that have and will occur in the
future _just_ because you can't be bothered putting in the effort to get
it fixed, then that's what you think.  Not much I can do about it,
really.

Neil
-- 
Neil Blakey-Milner
Sunesi Clinical Systems
nbm@mithrandr.moria.org


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