[1410] in athena10
bashrc should set PS1 or cshrc should not set prompt
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan Reed)
Sun Mar 8 20:29:47 2009
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From: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@MIT.EDU>
To: debathena@mit.edu
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Date: Sun, 8 Mar 2009 20:28:47 -0400
In the process of updating the Dotfiles document, I noticed that /usr/
athena/lib/init/bashrc no longer sets PS1. Discussion on zephyr today
suggests that this was a conscious change. I noted that there's a lot
of value in us being able to refer to and document "the athena
prompt", but it was pointed out that debathena-standard breaks this
anyway, since the prompt will likely be the shell's default.
However, it seems like a bad idea to have skew between the shells. If
it were up to me, I'd solve it by setting PS1="athena\$" in bashrc.
But the consensus seems to be that that's objectionable and a step
backwards. Therefore, I propose one of the following:
a) When we transition to bash in April, we bump .generation to "2",
and then change /usr/athena/lib/init/cshrc to set the prompt to "athena
%#" (ie: the current value of $prompt) for .generation < 2, and not
set prompt otherwise.
b) Unset $prompt in cshrc. The current default prompt on tcsh seems
to be "%U%m%u:%B%~%b%#" (the hostname underlined, a colon, pwd in
bold, and ">" unless it's a root shell).
I prefer (a).
Thoughts?
Additionally, if any other customizations were removed from bashrc
that are present in cshrc (modulo fundamental shell differences that
don't apply), we should address those (either in documentation, or by
changing cshrc to match bashrc).
-Jon
