[27672] in Athena Bugs
Re: Debathena: feature request: zsh shell
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Benjamin Kaduk)
Fri Sep 12 22:01:14 2014
Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2014 22:01:06 -0400 (EDT)
From: Benjamin Kaduk <kaduk@mit.edu>
To: a2z@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <201409112108.s8BL8lnx016919@outgoing.mit.edu>
Message-ID: <alpine.GSO.1.10.1409122153500.21571@multics.mit.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Cc: bugs@mit.edu
Errors-To: bugs-bounces@mit.edu
Hello,
On Thu, 11 Sep 2014, a2z@mit.edu wrote:
> 1) What were you trying to do?
>
> Set my default login shell to zsh.
>
> 3) What should have happened?
>
> It would be nice if zsh were installed.
Can you clarify whether you wish for zsh to be installed at all, versus
being available as a logon shell?
Adding a new logon shell for Athena represents a fair amount of work, as
the Athena environment is expected to provide a great deal of
shell-related functionality (e.g., sourcing .environment at the right
time, running several checks on startup and possibly displaying
diagnostics, providing the add shell alias and similar, etc..), and we
have not had anyone working on Debathena with sufficient zsh experience to
ensure that all the necessary functionality gets ported over.
We do occasionally have people ask about getting pieces of the Athena
functionality for their local use of zsh, and we usually don't hear any
complaints after we point them at the bash dotfiles, so maybe there is not
too much work involved; I just don't know.
Just adding the zsh package to the system so that it is available to be
run manually is comparatively much easier.
> 4) Does this problem happen only on this workstation, or other workstations?
>
> All of them, but not athena.dialup.mit.edu
It looks like zsh is explicitly installed on the dialups as part of the
process for creating dialups, so that is expected. (I am not sure, but
possibly there was some course software that wanted zsh available which
would have provided impetus to install it.)
Thanks,
Ben Kaduk
