[141] in athena10
Re: The default prompt
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Timothy G Abbott)
Fri Mar 28 23:58:18 2008
Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2008 23:57:34 -0400 (EDT)
From: Timothy G Abbott <tabbott@MIT.EDU>
To: linerva@mit.edu, debathena@mit.edu
cc: athena10@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64L.0803271452460.26747@vinegar-pot.mit.edu>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64L.0803282257230.5910@mega-man.mit.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed
Along with setting the prompt to the Debian defaults, I think we should no
longer:
- set CDPATH (which is evil),
- try to deal with a home directory of /var/athena/tmphomedir/ (that
condition is now impossible)
- configure tcsh to not stat /afs/* when tab-completing (fakestat handles this)
- set the "interactive" shell variable.
The relevant quilt patch for these changes is available at:
/mit/debathena/packages/athena/dotfiles/debathena-dotfiles-9.4.43/debian/patches/dotfiles-default-prompt.patch
I'm concerned the last change may affect users negatively, in that I'm
guessing the purpose of 'set interactive' is so that people can check
$?interactive in their .cshrc.mine. But I'm not certain.
I'm adding athena10 to the CC since future system dotfiles are definitely
something that we should agree on.
Probably there will be more now-unecessary code that will end up getting
removed from the system dotfiles, but I think that the changes to the
prompt will be the most user-visible and thus the most important to
discuss.
-Tim Abbott
On Thu, 27 Mar 2008, Timothy G Abbott wrote:
> I'm tempted to remove the code from the Debathena dotfiles that sets the
> prompt to "debathena% "/"debathena$ ", which will result in
> Debathena-workstation machines running the default Debian prompt. I think
> this will probably result in people having a better experience. Is there any
> reason not to do this (I'd probably update the linerva motd to note the
> change to avoid alarm)?
>
> -Tim Abbott
>
