[2102] in SIPB bug reports
Re: tcsh6 on the vax doesn't define hosttype
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Marc Horowitz)
Mon Sep 16 13:38:25 1991
To: tytso@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Cc: bug-sipb@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of Mon, 16 Sep 91 11:34:28 -0400.
Reply-To: Marc Horowitz <marc@MIT.EDU>
Date: Mon, 16 Sep 91 13:37:29 EDT
From: Marc Horowitz <marc@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
>> Well, no, it's not an athena dotfile bug. $hosttype is automatically set
>> by tcsh; I put it in there with the idea that since tcsh had to know
>> what architecture its binary was, why not save a fork/exec of
>> /bin/athena/machtype?
Sorry, I disagree. Currently, the athena dotfiles depend on features
of a particular shell. IMHO, it should only depend on vanilla BSD csh
features. Testing for tcsh is fine, as long as it does whatever is
necessary to emulate tcsh if csh is the shell.
>> My dotfiles aren't athena-based (thank God!), and they depend on
>> $hosttype. Of course, my dotfiles also automatically set $hosttype if
>> its not set by the shell, so I won't lose, but other people may have
>> custom dot files that will lose because of this. Shell variables are
>> relatively cheap, anyway, so I would suggest adding $hosttype for
>> backwards compatibility.
$HOSTTYPE is already there. I happen to prefer this, as the shell
isn't the only place I want to find out the kind of machine I'm on.
>> Nevertheless, if we're going to make the claim that we're going to
>> exactly replace /bin/csh, only better, then we should make sure that
>> we're providing complete backwards compatibility.
I never made that claim. I would like to support tcsh6, as it comes
from Cornell. I will make enhancements, but I will send them back.
So far, all of my enhancements have made it into the distribution. It
is now my opinion that athena should try to move away from having its
own home-brew shell, and re-implementing features which already exist
is NOT the right way to do it. Jerry Larivee is going to try to make
tcsh6 entirely backward compatible. If Cornell accepts his patches,
fine, I'll install them. If not, I'm not going to want to maintain a
separate shell from the rest of the world.
Marc
