=?iso-8859-1?Q?Nicol=E1s_Lichtmaier?=: > But every maintainer would need to know other shells. They can ask for help in debian-devel. Most stuff would be trivial, anyway. > And... we could have a ~/.nodefprofile (?) so we: That's what I meant when I said it was trivial. :) It only gets hairy if you want users to be able to allow some, but not all, special setups, which is also a desireable feature. > e. g.: fileutils would set color settings for ls, less would set > LESSPIPE. Having ls output color settings by default is a bad idea, since not everyone has a color-capable terminal. It requires an option to enable it, i.e., you need an alias or shell function. It is also debatable whether it makes the system much easier for naive users -- in my experience (back when I was a teacher), a largish number of people get confused when anything unusual happens, and having some files be of different colors is unusual. I don't know what LESSPIPE is (my less manual page doesn't know it). Could you describe? (Just so that I can try to shoot it down. :-) > So.. what should we do? Make sure programs work without special setup. > I'd say that all sh-like shells should be grouped.. and we should require > only basic sh syntax... But that would prevent us from setting up a nice prompt. Not good enough, if we're going to do this at all. If someone wants to provide a nice setup for novices (which is definitely a good thing to do), they can put it in a separate package, and ask the sysadmin to install a suitable line in /etc/profile (and /etc/csh.login, and other similar files). That way, we can keep the base distribution clean. Even better, when someone else wants to provide a Better Novice Environment, they don't need to replace the base distribution. -- Please read <http://www.iki.fi/liw/mail-to-lasu.html> before mailing me. Please don't Cc: me when replying to my message on a mailing list.
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