[181] in athena10
Re: System Dotfiles (was Re: /svn/athena r22913
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Timothy G Abbott)
Wed Apr 23 16:15:41 2008
Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2008 16:14:28 -0400 (EDT)
From: Timothy G Abbott <tabbott@MIT.EDU>
To: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@mit.edu>
cc: athena10@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <94E54174-B2B9-4828-9353-6AE378498A02@mit.edu>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64L.0804231548140.19179@vinegar-pot.mit.edu>
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On Wed, 23 Apr 2008, Jonathan Reed wrote:
> 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.
Yeah, I think that's the first time we can do it. But if we're going to
do it then, we may want to start planning for doing it now.
> 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.
The slow transition is often less painful -- MIT has the nice property
that the students get replaced every 4 years, so at least for the student
community (which are perhaps the biggest customers of Athena), the
transition is guaranteed to complete in 4-7 years.
This is certainly what I was originally thinking of when I suggested
"changing the default shell to bash".
-Tim Abbott
