[179] in athena10
Re: System Dotfiles (was Re: /svn/athena r22913
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan Reed)
Wed Apr 23 15:37:06 2008
Cc: athena10@mit.edu
Message-Id: <94E54174-B2B9-4828-9353-6AE378498A02@mit.edu>
From: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@MIT.EDU>
To: Timothy G Abbott <tabbott@mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64L.0804231056240.23969@vinegar-pot.mit.edu>
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Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2008 15:36:11 -0400
On Apr 23, 2008, at 1:57 PM, Timothy G Abbott wrote:
> I agree that the transition will require some release engineering.
> The main tricky thing will be people's dotfiles -- both that some
> people won't have the .bashrc that includes the system .bashrc
> (which I've already proposed a solution to, though we'd want to be
> sure that solution was completely deployed before switching shells),
> and that commands they ran in their .cshrc.mine will no longer
> work. If one were to go with "switching everyone from tcsh to
> bash", we could probably notify them using get_message (or email)
> and point them to documentation on how to translate their dotfiles.
> We might also want to make "setenv" point people to this
> documentation for a transitional period, since I think that'll be
> the most common difference.
Notifying people is going to be hard. People ignore lert/gms and
email for important things like deactivations - I have no reason to
believe it would work any more effectively for notifying users of
shell changes. Dotfiles are going to be a problem, particularly for
professors who customized their accounts years ago, are reluctant to
come in for support, and are reluctant to play with new settings and/
or start from scratch. I'm trying to think of any other recent major
changes in order to set some precedent. The WinAthena AFS->DFS
migration doesn't really count, as it was a small percentage of the
community to begin with. Perhaps some folks who were around during
the NFS->AFS migration can offer some insight as to how to manage this?
> I don't think that Athena can stick with tcsh forever, so this
> transitional work must happen at some point. Yes, there will be a
> lot of support calls. But they'll probably all happen in a short
> interval which can be planned for in advance (e.g. SIPB can make
> sure the SIPB office is well-staffed during business hours that
> week, if you want to direct people there, OLC can make sure they
> double-cover shifts that week, etc.).
I agree this change needs to happen, I just remain unconvinced that
this is the right time to do it. Also, we'd need to think hard about
when this "short interval" would. Summer is a terrible time, as is
the beginning of term. I'd say the earliest we'd want to do this is
~2 weeks after Reg Day in Sept.
Thinking some more about this, I wonder whether it really would be
terrible to only transition new accounts, rather than the entire
world. If we're going to update our docs anyway, we could have "For
bash users" and "For tcsh users" sections, along with a "How do I know
what shell I'm using?" stock answer. Maybe it might be easier if we
knew it would only affect the frosh and incoming grad students,
particularly since they are largely a captive audience during
Orientation and we can tailor our presentations to take the new shell
change into account.
-Jon
