Casper.Dik at Sun.COM wrote:
>
> >Umpf... ;-/
> >The whole "better default shell environment"-cases center around "better
> >defaults for beginners" (following the lead of distributions like SuSE,
> >Ubuntu and Debian 4.0) and not "personal preferences for the
> >professionals/admins/developers" (who likely start ranting about the
> >"defaults" and are able to change them to match their preferences in
> >their per-user configuration files. I agree that the defaults are not
> >"perfect" for experts but they are very helpfull for "beginners" (which
> >are usually not able to change this setting without learning the shell
> >first).
>
> Then it occurs to me that setting them in /etc/profile, /etc/*rc*
> is WRONG.
>
> By all means, refresh /etc/skel and have beginners populate
> their accounts from there (as the tools do or should do)
And how can we update those files in the user accounts ? At least in
europe there are issues with data privacy and many sites explicitly
disallow any channges of per-user data by admins without the explicit
permission of the users. Anything delivered to the users ${HOME} is
"fixed in stone" and cannot easily be changed anymore once it is
delivered to the user.
Imagine larger university sites with something like ~~80000 accounts. If
you put the "wrong" things into ~/.profile, ~/.bashrc and/or ~/.kshrc
this will result in a horror for the admins.
That's why this case explicitly says that the matching files in
/etc/skel/ should be delivered _empty_ except comments that admins
should edit the machine-wide files (e.g. /etc/profile, /etc/bash.bashrc
and /etc/ksh.kshrc for side-/machine-wide defaults).
Another issue is described in PSARC 2006/550: ksh93 implements the POSIX
shell standard very closely, including the detail that the shell itself
must not enable any flags by default - which means that any editor mode
cannot be by default by the shell itself. The standard does not forbid
the use of startup scripts and that's why we use /etc/ksh.kshrc to set a
default editor mode to improve the _usabilty_ (and to be in sync with
bash's builtin default (which is a POSIX violation but one of the
primary factors why "bash" is popular - it has working cursor
keys+history by default)). In theory this could be done via ~/.kshrc but
this turns out to be a huge problem if we want to deploy _new_ defaults
like enabling the "multiline" editor option. We are not allowed to edit
or even touch per-user ~/.kshrc files - which leaves as only options
"/etc/ksh.kshrc" or just say "sorry, we can't help you".
----
Bye,
Roland
--
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