From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from ditsydh.syd.dit.csiro.au ([130.155.128.18]) by archone.tamu.edu with SMTP id <22542>; Fri, 28 Jun 1991 20:46:41 -0500 Received: by ditsydh.syd.dit.csiro.au id AA29100 (5.64+/IDA/DIT-0.9 for rc@archone.tamu.edu); Sat, 29 Jun 91 11:46:09 +1000 From: John Mackin Date: Fri, 28 Jun 1991 20:10:25 -0500 To: The rc Mailing List Cc: You guys should ask to join the list: Noel Hunt , Boyd Roberts , ; Subject: Re: stuff In-Reply-To: <91Jun28.130752cdt.22542@archone.tamu.edu> Message-Id: <9106291110.27256.rc.badad@syd.dit.csiro.au> X-Face: 39seV7n\`#asqOFdx#oj/Uz*lseO_1n9n7rQS;~ve\e`&Z},nU1+>0X^>mg&M.^X$[ez>{F k5[Ah<7xBWF-@-ru?& @4K4-b`ydd^`(n%Z{ 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.