[184] in athena10
Re: System Dotfiles (was Re: /svn/athena r22913
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathon Weiss)
Thu Apr 24 16:25:51 2008
Message-Id: <200804242025.m3OKP3xi009814@speaker-for-the-dead.mit.edu>
From: Jonathon Weiss <jweiss@MIT.EDU>
To: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@MIT.EDU>
cc: Timothy G Abbott <tabbott@MIT.EDU>, athena10@MIT.EDU
In-reply-to: Your message of "Wed, 23 Apr 2008 15:36:11 EDT."
<94E54174-B2B9-4828-9353-6AE378498A02@mit.edu>
Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2008 16:25:03 -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?
Hmmm, I haven't used these nurons in a while. The transition was done
over the summer, I believe one server partition at a time. I don't
reall remember the user education campaign, but it must have occurred
both over the summer and in the fall whne people came back to campus.
Jonathon
