Re: bug reports and other stuff

Re: bug reports and other stuff

[Mark-Jason Dominus]

> Another of the rc'ers in Sydney has added username expansion.  He used
> % for the username introducer character; sh used to have that in it
> around here, before we all changed to ~ some years back.

    My rc is compiled with the GNU readline library compiled in;
readline allows filename completion (press TAB, just like in emacs), and
understands ~.  It is very frustrating to have two incompatible
home-directory abbreviations in the same program: readline will do
filename completion on a name that begins with ~/, but rc won't
understand it; rc will accept a filename that begins with $home/, but
readline won't complete it.

    I understand that the completion characteristics of GNU readline are
eaasy to modify, though, so maybe the right answer is just to teach
readline that `$home' means the same as `~' and leave it at that.  Could
anyone who's used readline speak to this, perhaps?

-D.

   Nihil tam absurde dici potest, quod non dicatur ab aliquo philosophorum.
Mark-Jason Dominus 	  			    mjd@central.cis.upenn.edu 

bug reports and other stuff

[John Mackin]

So how about a consensus on bug reports?  Byron, do you want us to mail them
to you only, or to the list?  I can see advantages in each.

(By the way Byron, I'm sorry I haven't gotten you the arg.h stuff yet.
Mega-hassles at work.  I'll try to get onto it soon.)

Now that we have the list, we can talk about all kinds of things.  I'm
doing support for non-ANSI C builds of rc, so if anyone needs that I can
help out.  Hopefully when I get it nicely refined Byron might like to
include it with rc.  (The idea is not to change the code at all, but
just run it through filters.)

Another of the rc'ers in Sydney has added username expansion.  (Just
as an interesting aside, he did that on a MIPS, and he got to see
how huge a win Byron has gotten from not using the standard libraries.
Adding one call to getpwuid(), which of course dragged in stdio, ran
the text size of the object up from (I think) around 100K to 230K.
He quickly implemented non-stdio password file stuff!)  He used %
for the username introducer character; sh used to have that in it
around here, before we all changed to ~ some years back.

Philosophically, it might be nice not to have username stuff in
the shell.  In practice, I could never use an interactive shell that
didn't have it.

Are we going to see this as a standard rc feature?  Byron, what do
you think?  You have shown that you don't consider Duff's design
a sacred cow -- you put back exactly those builtins that he deleted
that he shouldn't have, and left out the ones that he should -- so
do you think there is a reason not to have it, apart from the fact
that Duff doesn't?

What do other people on the list think about this?

rc is truly a _lovely_ shell.  Here's a tidbit David Hogan and I worked
out the other night, for emptying your X access control list and
enabling access control:

	xhost - ^ ( ` { xhost | sed 1d } '' )

Sure you can do that in sh, but it's MUCH grosser.

OK,
John.