begin quoting Neil Schneider as of Thu, Mar 03, 2005 at 10:04:37AM -0800:
> Stewart Stremler said:
> > Turnabout is fair play.
>
> <snip>
>
> I didn't mean alternatives are bad. What I meant was that you accuse
> "them" of being arrogant, while you maintain that your way is the
> best.
Of course I do -- I think I'm right. But what I am NOT doing is
maintaining that everyone-must-use-tcsh-because-it-is-the-best, so
in that sense, no, I'm not demonstrating the same sort of arrogance.
I'm demonstrating a totally *different* sort of arrogance.
I do *not* claim that an all-tcsh Linux system would be *best* -- I
would think it would be rather clunky in fact. It would just be
*different*, and get up the nose of the all-the-world-should-use-bash
types.
I don't agree that bash is best. However, neither do I claim that *my*
choice is best for everyone else; different people presumably would find
different shells and scripting languages more or less suited to their
particular style/worldview/problem-space.
I don't have a problem when people think bash is best. I just don't
appreciate their zealotry infecting everything they touch -- "Oh,
bash is great, we don't need a real sh anymore! We can use bash
everywhere, and _call_ it sh!"
Bleah.
One should try to recognize ones own zealotry and take appropriate
measures to account for it coloring your attitudes. I am a zealot
in the "it's the user's computer, it should be the user's choice!"
area, which is often raises some technically difficult problems.
> You seem to see a conspiracy, where I don't.
No, I see an _attitude_.
It's not a conspiracy. It's just a prevailing attitude. An implict
arrogance that comes from controlling a majority of the mind-share.
It's the same attitude that Microsofties have -- "this is the way it
is, everyone should do it our way, you're allowed to be different if
you want to work at it but you're stupid to do so, so just suck it
up and learn to love it."
I jumped to Linux because I found that attitude repulsive.
I'm not really in the mood to jump again.
> Every linux system I've
> every set up had a choice of shells. The default is bash. There has to
> be a default,
No, there does _not_ have to be a default, except for root. The root
account has been *traditionally* a bourne shell; and for preference, a
statically-linked bourne shell. When you create a user-account, you
should *choose* the shell.
Okay, so geeks are lazy, and they write tools to automate even the
simplest tasks, so we get adduser and useradd. And as good little
programs go, a missing argument gets a default. (I think that the
default should be /bin/false, but again, that's me...) So if a default
is truly desired (aside from the sensible option), then surely that
should be a choice when installing the system? ("Default User Shell")
But it isn't. Whoops.
I dare say that most linux users NEVER give any other shell an
honest try -- they just go with the default.
> and I for one am glad they didn't choose csh or ksh.
You'd rather have sh (not bash in disguise, but a real sh) over csh?
If you're going to compare shells with bash, compare with tcsh and zsh.
Don't compare bash with csh, compare *sh* with csh -- and I find that
csh is *far* better user-shell than sh.
> What are the default shells on Sun, OS-X, SCO, BSD and other Unix? I
> believe they all use sh. Bash is supposed to be a new an improved
> version of sh, isn't it?
OS-X defaulted to tcsh, amid complaints from those who think that the
only shell worth looking at is bash. I ran across people on IRC who
claimed that OS X sucked because it didn't come with "a unix shell".
Apple has since changed the "default" to bash.
If I was looking for new-and-improved, I'd go with zsh.
-Stewart "Hm, three new distributiosn - tcsh, tcl, and zsh based!" Stremler
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