Bug#983116: im-config: does not work under wayland and zsh as login shell
Hi,
Here is my thought.
I think we shouldn't fool ourself to believe the good old chsh(1) command works as advertised :-) That was only true for character terminal only sysv-init system.
User side approach:
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We need to keep so-called login-shell always as Bash if you don't want to drive yourself crazy. Adding workarounds for all possible choices of so-called POSIX shell is just waste of resource. If we make work around for zsh, then we need to do it for ksh, posh, .... POSIX is no magic word for shells to be treated as equal since there are subtle differences.
If you want non-bash shell for your interactive shell to be DIFFERENT, set it in terminal software. This terminal software approach should work for any shell without trouble with gnome-terminal and probably for konsole or ketty.
If you want to use different shell for Linux console or ssh connected terminal console, I think setting in ~/.bashrc as `exec /usr/bin/zsh -i` should give you what you want, I think (need to be tested but I hope you get my point). I think delay of starting bash has minimal damage.
To conclude, the old ways of setting login-shell via chsh is deprecated. With the above mentioned methods, any shells found on Debian including ones totally non-POSIX can be your login interactive shell.
zsh
fish
fizsh
rc
csh
tcsh
xonsh
elvish
...
(Maybe any REPL interpreter like python3, lua, tcl, ... may be used as interactive shell, too if you want to be really DIFFERENT)
Distribution side approach:
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As a distribution, maybe we need to fix gdm3, kdm, xdm, ... so they perse their configuration file always with bash (or dash) irrespective of login shell setting. This needs a lot of energy and social skill to realize.
Osamu
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