[ksh93-integration-discuss] Re: /etc/ksh.kshrc for ksh93[PSARC/2006/587 Timeout: 10/24/2006]

[Roland Mainz]

Joseph Kowalski wrote:
> 
> > From: Joseph Kowalski <Joseph.Kowalski at eng.sun.com>
> ..
> > > gmacs is considered an intuitive beginner's editing mode.  It is the
> > > default editing mode in bash and more or less matches the common input
> > > mode of various GUI toolkits and desktops, including Gnome/GTK+,
> > > KDE/Qt, CDE/Motif, Mozilla/XULRunner/Gecko, JAVA, and Xaw/Xaw3D.
> >
> > None the less, this seems like a strange choice for Solaris as there isn't
> > anything called "gmacs" on the system.
> ..
> > I think I would be more inclinded to be accepting of gmacs if it was the
> > common default mode for ksh on other systems.  Is it?
> 
> Or alternately, why isn't the best choice to either not ship the file
> or (probably better) to ship it empty?  I fully understand the motivation
> to allow an easily modifiable system wide default, but why should we
> empose a style judgement on everybody?

Umpf... because the ksh93 "default" is that no editor mode is enabled,
leaving beginners completely puzzled how to proceed.

The whole addition of /etc/ksh.kshrc is about improving _USUABILITY_.
Please ask yourself: Why prefer people "bash" ? The answer is: Because
it is a shell which is very easy to use. It has "working cursor keys"
and is quite intuitive to use. I really like to do the same for ksh93 to
improve the usuability of Solaris - the old Solaris ksh is really hated
by both admins and users for not having "working cursor keys"&&history.
We can't use "bash"'s solution of doing this via a builtin setting
because this would violate the POSIX standard (which requires that all
"set -o flags" are off by default (excluding any settings made after the
shell started and reads it's startup files (like /etc/profile,
/etc/ksh.kshrc, ~/.kshrc etc.))) - instead we use the file which was
originally invented to handle this kind of settings: /etc/ksh.kshrc

----

Bye,
Roland

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