[177] in athena10
Re: System Dotfiles (was Re: /svn/athena r22913
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Wed Apr 23 00:56:31 2008
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: Timothy G Abbott <tabbott@mit.edu>
Cc: athena10@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64L.0804221932280.23969@vinegar-pot.mit.edu>
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Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2008 00:55:49 -0400
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I'll go over this in detail tomorrow or Thursday. Some of the items are
probably a good idea. But a general response:
I don't like being in the situation of sticking users with an unusual
default shell (tcsh) and overriding the native operating system's shell
defaults without compelling reasons. Most of that situation was
inherited from before my time.
However, even in the Unix world, focus has shifted away from the
command-line as the usual way for users to get stuff done, except when
following instructions in documentation. From a picking of battles
perspective, I am not sure we want to get incur the documentation and
support pain of making substantial changes to the current situation.
In particular, I don't see how to get from tcsh to bash as the default
shell without inordinate pain. Either we switch the shells of existing
users, or we only switch the shells of incoming users. The former is
highly discontinuous for any user who makes much use of the shell (which
may not be a lot of users, but is probably enough to generate a lot of
support calls) and the latter creates a major fork in documentation and
support.
I'm also not convinced that now is an especially good time to be making
changes of this nature. If this were the 2.0 release of a piece of
software, we would want to pile all of the incompatible changes in at
once on the assumption that people will stick with 1.x until they're
ready to face the combined pain of the upgrade. Athena isn't a
voluntary upgrade; one day the cluster machines are all running the new
release and cluster users have to accept it whether they want to or not.
As such, when you're going to do something painful in an Athena release
upgrade, you don't necessarily want to compound it by doing something
else painful at the same time.
