[2957] in Release_7.7_team
Re: Mail client transition plan
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Wed Sep 19 10:33:43 2001
Message-Id: <200109191433.KAA13752@egyptian-gods.MIT.EDU>
To: John Hawkinson <jhawk@MIT.EDU>
cc: release-team@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 18 Sep 2001 10:23:15 EDT."
<200109181423.KAA23296@multics.mit.edu>
Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2001 10:33:37 -0400
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
> Disliking this as I do, I put forth the suggestion to use an
> environment variable in .cshrc, perhaps a generic one, like "setenv
> DOT_CSHRC_VERSION 1.15", or a specific one, like "setenv
> ATHENA_EVA_NOASK 1".
Flag dotfiles have two nice properties which environment variables do
not: they can be easily created and deleted from scripts and programs,
and we can scan for them in world-listable home directories. The
first property is important here, since .athena_evo_noask (or
whatever) would exist not just for new users but also for users who
had select "don't ask me again" from the mail script dialog. The
second property could also be important; I used .athena_dash_interface
so that we could make a more informed decision about whether to
desupport mwm or dash in some far future year.
The downside of flag dotfiles is that they cannot be conditionalized;
that was a problem for .athena_dash_interface for people who wanted to
use the old interface on some machines but not others. So we also
supported an environment variable there, although that means a homedir
scan might not turn up everyone who uses the dash interface. But it
doesn't seem likely that users would want to conditionalize "don't ask
me about the mail client," and anyway they can edit the mail button
configuration or create their own pine alias if they want different
behavior.
