Re: early reaction(s) to rc

[Chris Siebenmann <cks@hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu>]

[This is part 1 of N parts of stuff; more to come as I digest and
comment on my pile of email.]

John writes:
| This is what I fail to follow; I don't understand why one needs to tell
| whether or not the shell is interactive in order to accomplish the goal
| of making a root prompt be something arbitrary.

 Figuring out what the root prompt should be may take a significant
number of (potentially expensive) operations; I'd like to do it only
when necessary, to avoid the performance hit.

 In hindsight, setting the root prompt was a bad example of per-shell
startup actions. A much better one for people with windowing systems
is arranging a per-window history, something that is highly useful
(especially for me, as just specifying a global history file seems to
result in all sorts of interesting jumbling up of stuff). For X, one
can almost get there cheaply with a prompt function, but it's not
quite close enough (and going the final step is expensive; you need to
check what your current tty is, which is not something I want to do
for every prompt).

	- cks