[811] in Release_7.7_team
Re: Agenda for 1/9
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Hawkinson)
Thu Jan 9 14:51:39 1997
Date: Thu, 9 Jan 1997 14:51:32 -0500
To: Craig Fields <cfields@MIT.EDU>
Cc: release-team@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: "[810] in Release_7.7_team"
From: John Hawkinson <jhawk@MIT.EDU>
> I can't help feeling that those system directories are not in the
> default user search path for a reason.
I continue to think it is a serious mistake to assign deliberate intent
to the whims that people implemented but never thought about and never
intended to be fixtures of society or operating systems.
> The frustrating thing is that I can't point to anything concrete
> that is bad about it, just random classes of bad things that could
> happen, and the fact that all of this stuff is being added just for
> the sake of ping as I understand it.
And all the other binaries in there that people use. Do you add
those directories to your path? I do, and it certainly bothers me
that I should have to.
> (A corresponding change in the Irix path should also be made, given
> that as a purpose.)
Right.
> I would find it much preferable (and had forgotten about this idea
> until Alexis pointed it out a few hours ago) to simply add a symlink
> for ping into /usr/athena/bin if we think it's that important.
Egad, that's scary. The operating system ships with these programs,
users should be able to use them with minimal inconvenience.
It was suggested one concern was completion changes. I would suggest
that 95% of all of our users never use completion for the first word
on the command line, only for filenames and such parameters.
--jhawk
