From owner-freebsd-current Sun Aug 26 12:45:54 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from o-o.org (o-o.org [216.90.196.100]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6946437B407 for ; Sun, 26 Aug 2001 12:45:50 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from kaila@o-o.org) Received: from localhost (kaila@localhost [127.0.0.1]) by o-o.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id OAA76434; Sun, 26 Aug 2001 14:42:45 -0500 (CDT) (envelope-from kaila@o-o.org) Date: Sun, 26 Aug 2001 14:42:45 -0500 (CDT) From: Kaila To: Kris Kennaway Cc: Jim Bryant , freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Why is csh tcsh? This can be a bad thing... In-Reply-To: <20010825043725.A55393@xor.obsecurity.org> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Sat, 25 Aug 2001, Kris Kennaway wrote: > On Sat, Aug 25, 2001 at 01:50:33AM -0500, Jim Bryant wrote: > > > For 5.0, I maybe the black sheep in saying this, but I'd like to see > > /bin/csh be the real thing for 5.0. By all means, leave tcsh in > > /bin, but for the sake of backwards compatability, IMHO `ln > > /bin/tcsh /bin/csh` was a bad idea. > > Frankly, this isn't going to happen. We went through all this months > ago: please just accept the will of the community and drop the matter. > > Kris > Frankly, this exact statement is the sort of reason I didn't try to weigh in on this issue myself when it happened, or any of a dozen other issues. Adding tcsh is fine, renaming it to csh breaks things. That's like renaming less to more... oh wait, we already did that. The argument isn't to not add new software, it's not even to not drop old software. Add tcsh is fine. Get rid of csh is fine. Just don't call tcsh csh, without making sure the csh call is 100% compatible with the last version of csh shipped. If tcsh were csh, then it would be named csh. Guess what? It's named tcsh because it is NOT csh. It's better to have _nothing_ in /bin/csh and be done with it. If that had been done, I'd have been saved several hours of work and research personally to find out why scores of scripts broke, including some things as simple as login prompts that had embedded escape sequences. I won't say anything more on this issue, and probably on no others as I am fairly sure that it won't be listened to. I will just say that I have been using FreeBSD since 2.0-snap, and have been a consistent advocate of it. I have spent many thousands of dollars having merchandise made (pens, cards, etc), which I gave away free in an effort to bring in users. I have converted my entire company to FreeBSD, and I am now seriously looking at alternatives to FreeBSD. Perhaps net or open, perhaps linux, perhaps forking my own distribution. The motto used to be "do it right", not "do it the way WE want it on OUR machines, and screw the people who don't make the decisions or cause to much trouble to ignore." If you want to know why the user community is so quiet, you need to ask yourself. If you were spoken to this way, if your preferences and needs were consistently ignored on the basis "this is a volunteer project, neener!", how likely would you be to bother commenting? I realize I'll probably get flamed for this, but at this point, I no longer care. I won't be paying to have any more pens or cards made, I won't be making any more deals with companies to get free resources for this community, and I may begin transitioning my network soon. I can't keep spending more time fixing this kind of silly cruft than I did installing the os. [ Name : Christine F. Maxwell ] [ ICQ : #45010616 ] [ EMail : cfm@o-o.org ] [ IRC : Kaila ] [ Home : http://www.cfm.o-o.org/ ] [ BBS : http://www.aci.o-o.org ] To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message