stuff

stuff

[Byron Rakitzis]

Ok, let me try to address some of the issues that have come up:

1) backquote will change. I'm working on the code right now. It will work like John
"intuitively" expects it to.

2) I think home directory abbreviations are useless. On the system I administer here,
I keep a directory called /u, with soft links in /u pointing to the real home directory
of a user. e.g.,

; ls -l /u/byron
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root            8 Apr 16 11:53 /u/byron -> /a/byron

The advantage of this is that it is not shell-specific; you can ALWAYS refer to /u/byron/foo
and know that it will work.

Finally, I always make the assignment

h=$home

in my rcrc, so I talk about files like $h/lib/sun4/regexp.o, etc. It's not that many
more characters to type (1 more!), after all. Paul Haahr taught me this trick.

3) A general aside: I knew I was opening a can of worms when I added support for GNU
readline. This position may sound incongruous to you, but I REALLY don't want to be
in the business of supporting rc+readline. My ultimate goal is to write a mux-like
xterm so that I can put all of my command editing into the window system, where it
should be. (score 80 on the Pike-o-meter for Byron!)

Let me say that I am distressed; I don't know how to reconcile my desire for a small
shell with users' desire to use readline. Modifying readline to accept $home or $h
instead of ~ sounds like a good idea, but the LAST thing I want to do is create
a set of rc-specific readline sources.

Re: stuff

[John Mackin]

    2) I think home directory abbreviations are useless. On the system
    I administer here, I keep a directory called /u, with soft links in
    /u pointing to the real home directory of a user. e.g.,

Son of a BITCH!  I was almost sure someone was going to throw this
particular red herring up -- so sure that I almost argued this one
in advance.  I just hoped it wasn't going to be Byron...

You see, not everyone is a system administrator.  I was, in my previous
job of seven years standing, but in my current job I am not.  I can't do
this.  What do I do?  Suck rocks?  Ask the so-called system administrator
to do it?  Please, not the latter.  He'd end up chmodding / to 700 again.

No.  I want username expansion -- and I want it from the shell, as will
become clear later in this message.  If you agree with me, please speak
up so we can try to convince Byron, as I _hate_ trying to maintain
private patches to other people's programs.  Hell, Byron, you could at
least put it under conditional compilation, so that people who truly
didn't want it could compile it out -- and I don't see that you are
in a position to be _terribly_ holier-than-thou...  Having praised you
earlier for improving on Duff greatly in the builtin department, I don't
see why I shouldn't now say that I cannot imagine what led you to add
builtin echo...  Having done that, your ~ position weakens a little,
yes?  (By the way, we have an ECHO conditional in our sources -- and
it is turned _off_.)

    3) A general aside: I knew I was opening a can of worms when I
    added support for GNU readline. This position may sound incongruous
    to you, but I REALLY don't want to be in the business of supporting
    rc+readline. My ultimate goal is to write a mux-like xterm so that
    I can put all of my command editing into the window system, where
    it should be. (score 80 on the Pike-o-meter for Byron!)

    Let me say that I am distressed; I don't know how to reconcile my
    desire for a small shell with users' desire to use readline.
    Modifying readline to accept $home or $h instead of ~ sounds like a
    good idea, but the LAST thing I want to do is create a set of
    rc-specific readline sources.

Well.  I didn't know why there was any gnu readline support in rc; but I
didn't care, since it was under a conditional that I could notably fail
to turn on.

I don't blame you for being distressed, Byron.  It's your obvious good
taste being revolted at the foul stench given off by the ludicrous stuff
in gnu readline.

Read my lips: NO FILENAME COMPLETION.  No.  None of that.  A shell is a
shell from coast to coast -- and one thing that does NOT go in the shell
is ANYTHING that knows ANYTHING about the TERMINAL!!!!  This is just
so stupid that I can't even begin to say how stupid it in fact is.

[Aside to Byron: I'm with you, Captain.  I used mux on Blits and 5620's
for several years, until the sad day our V8 VAX was decomissioned, and
muxterm IS the terminal program of Sutekh.  I have done quite a lot of work
towards a muxterm clone on X already -- indeed, there is a version at Basser
that already works, but unfortunately some of the source has been lost :(.
We should collaborate on this.  Btw, have you bought sam from the Toolchest
yet?  If not, you should, and get extra X heat for it from Doug Gwyn and
me.  Also, I have a wool package for gwm that makes it manage windows
just like mux did.]

As I say, your distress in natural; recall the wonderful scene in `A
Clockwork Orange' where the female doctor whose name I can't recall is
talking to Alex after his first "therapy" session?  He says he can't
understand why the violence in the films made him sick, and she replies
that normal people react to scenes of violence with ``horror and nausea'',
if I recall correctly.  Well, you are, like any programmer with taste,
reacting to -lreadline with horror and nausea.  If people are going to
ask for rc-specific changes to readline, your course is clear: tear
out the readline support, and tell anyone who asks that it was just
a bad dream -- and if they produce evidence, claim you had a gastric
condition that day and didn't know what it was that you were doing.

Perhaps that's enough for now.

OK,
John.