[186] in athena10
Re: System Dotfiles (was Re: /svn/athena r22913
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan Reed)
Thu Apr 24 17:06:38 2008
Cc: athena10@mit.edu, Timothy G Abbott <tabbott@mit.edu>
Message-Id: <92F44A9B-BED7-4397-B9D4-260A702B041E@mit.edu>
From: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@MIT.EDU>
To: Kenneth Charles Arnold <kcarnold@mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <1209070336.7731.14.camel@m38-370-9.mit.edu>
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Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2008 17:06:23 -0400
> 1.
> function setenv { eval "export \"$1\"=\"$2\""; }
> (even: [ "$0" != "bash"] && echo "Fix $0...")
Adding customizations that allow bash to masquerade as tcsh is a
horrible idea from a support point of view. We should either
transition existing accounts or leave them alone, but having a bash
that supports a tiny subset of tcsh syntax is just asking for trouble.
> 2.
> if cmp ~/.cshrc /usr/prototype_user/.cshrc; then
> echo "You have customized your environment, so we are leaving your"
> echo "old setup alone. See $INFO_LOCATION for more details."
> else
> chsh $USER bash # or something that actually works
> fi
Most customizations on Athena are done by creating files that don't
already exist (.environment, .cshrc.mine, .startup.X, etc) so there's
nothing to compare them to. Additionally, the presence of the files
doesn't necessarily mean that the customizations are incompatible with
bash.
> For .environment, I already have my shell as bash but .environment
> is in
> csh format; this seems to work. If not, sed -i.bak 's/setenv (\w+)
> (.*)$/export \1=\2/g .environment, etc.)
I'm not comfortable with changing users dotfiles for them. We can
certainly create some scripts in the release locker, along the lines
of "fixpanel", that users can run, but IMHO, we should avoid doing
anything unsolicited, even with notification. I believe we asked
users to confirm things like gconf version migration, etc, but I could
be wrong.
-Jon
