[3262] in testers
Re: Feedback on 8.1
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Thu Jun 19 11:55:25 1997
To: Mike Barker <mbarker@MIT.EDU>
Cc: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>, testers@MIT.EDU, rar@MIT.EDU, sao@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 19 Jun 1997 09:40:06 EDT."
<199706191340.JAA03433@megara.MIT.EDU>
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 1997 11:55:15 EDT
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
It's true, this probably should have been brought before the release
team. I believe it didn't occur to me to do so because I didn't make
the change actively; I just didn't propagate it from 8.0 into the new
packs/glue structure.
For background, I should note at this point that typing "f" was not
quite the same as typing "finger"; it gave you /usr/ucb/finger.
Anyway, I've been talking this over with several people. Andy thinks
it should be put back. Mike Whitson liked the fact that there was
easy access to the /usr/ucb/finger command, but didn't think having
the one-letter abbreviation was a valid justification. jhawk agreed
with me that it should go away, but also agreed with Carla that it
should be documented. (It was documented in the system release notes,
but I hadn't picked it out for inclusion in the user release notes.)
(I don't buy into Mike Whitson's argument, incidentally. We don't
provide alternate names for the non-Athena versions of telnet, rlogin,
etc.; we pretty much only do it for passwd, and then because there is
an important, frequently-used function performed by the native passwd
command which ours doesn't do.)
I think the large majority of our users use both platforms at
different times, as opposed to our testers who tend to only use one
platform. So I continue to believe that few users will be hurt by
this change, but I'm quite willing to accept that it should be
documented in the user release notes.
