[gentoo-dev] RFC: tcsh vs. csh, removal of the latter

[gentoo-dev] RFC: tcsh vs. csh, removal of the latter

[Grobian]

Hi all,

We currently have both tcsh and csh in the tree.  For those who don't
know what they are: they are shells.  tcsh is the more sophisticated
little brother of csh.  Their relationship is roughly comparable to the
relationshop between bash and sh shells.

Like bash and sh, tcsh is able to replace csh as it is compatible with
it, hence most distributions install tcsh and a symlink csh -> tcsh
these days.

The tcsh ebuild used to create this symlink for csh, but due to a
mistake that I made it doesn't anymore now.  csh used to block on tcsh
which more or less meant that you had to choose for one or the other.

Problem here is that creating a conditional symlink for csh -> tcsh is a
bit dirty, and leaves the user with a system that has no csh in case the
csh is unmerged after tcsh was installed.

It appears that there are a few packages that depend on one of the shells.
For csh:
 *  media-gfx/maya
 *  sci-chemistry/namd
 *  sci-chemistry/sparky
For tcsh:
 *  media-gfx/maya
    media-gfx/radiance
    net-analyzer/sara
    sci-biology/ncbi-tools
    sci-chemistry/gamess
    sci-chemistry/gromacs
 *  sci-chemistry/namd
    sci-chemistry/nmrpipe
 *  sci-chemistry/sparky
    x86 dev-lang/gnat

All packages that depend on csh also depend on tcsh (or relation).

Because csh is rather old and tcsh can be used as replacement, I would
like to have csh removed from the tree, then have tcsh always providing
the symlink csh -> tcsh.  The situation is a bit the same as Gentoo not
providing an ebuild for sh, and bash just installing a symlink for
sh -> bash.

Are there any objections to removing csh from the tree?  If there are no
problems with csh removal before Feb 1st 2006, then I will starting from
that date work on getting csh removed by masking it, blocking tcsh and
csh, and request for updates of the packages that depend on csh.


-- 
Fabian Groffen
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gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: tcsh vs. csh, removal of the latter

[Donnie Berkholz]

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Grobian wrote:
> Problem here is that creating a conditional symlink for csh -> tcsh is a
> bit dirty, and leaves the user with a system that has no csh in case the
> csh is unmerged after tcsh was installed.

...

> Because csh is rather old and tcsh can be used as replacement, I would
> like to have csh removed from the tree, then have tcsh always providing
> the symlink csh -> tcsh.  The situation is a bit the same as Gentoo not
> providing an ebuild for sh, and bash just installing a symlink for
> sh -> bash.

How does e.g. python do this for the various versions? You could do
similar, if you want to keep csh in the tree.

Thanks,
Donnie


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Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: tcsh vs. csh, removal of the latter

[Stuart Herbert]

Hi,

On 1/25/06, Grobian <grobian@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Because csh is rather old and tcsh can be used as replacement, I would
> like to have csh removed from the tree, then have tcsh always providing
> the symlink csh -> tcsh.  The situation is a bit the same as Gentoo not
> providing an ebuild for sh, and bash just installing a symlink for
> sh -> bash.

I don't agree that the comparison holds true.

It appears to be true that the tree doesn't contain a true Bourne
shell (although we could always look at the OpenSolaris sources if we
ever wanted one [1]), but the tree does contain these alternatives to
bash:

* app-shells/ash
* app-shells/ksh
* app-shells/pdksh

The BSD userland doesn't link /bin/sh to /bin/bash; I'm not sure what
they use as /bin/sh.

The csh package currently has a maintainer who is an active Gentoo
developer; have you spoken to taviso first to find out whether he
wants to remove csh from the tree?

[1] http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/sh.html

Best regards,
Stu

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Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: tcsh vs. csh, removal of the latter

[Mike Frysinger]

On Wednesday 25 January 2006 15:47, Stuart Herbert wrote:
> The csh package currently has a maintainer who is an active Gentoo
> developer; have you spoken to taviso first to find out whether he
> wants to remove csh from the tree?

last we talked with taviso he had no problem punting csh
-mike
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gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: tcsh vs. csh, removal of the latter

[Grobian]

On 25-01-2006 16:19:54 -0500, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> On Wednesday 25 January 2006 15:47, Stuart Herbert wrote:
> > The csh package currently has a maintainer who is an active Gentoo
> > developer; have you spoken to taviso first to find out whether he
> > wants to remove csh from the tree?
> 
> last we talked with taviso he had no problem punting csh

I probably should have said that there is a bug that is triggering this
problem, and that taviso indeed was "happy" to remove it from his
maintenance list, hence the perhaps drastically sounding solution for a
seemingly small problem.

Sorry about that.


-- 
Fabian Groffen
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gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: tcsh vs. csh, removal of the latter

[Peter Volkov (pva)]

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On Срд, 2006-01-25 at 20:57 +0100, Grobian wrote:
> Are there any objections to removing csh from the tree?  If there are no
> problems with csh removal before Feb 1st 2006, then I will starting from
> that date work on getting csh removed by masking it, blocking tcsh and
> csh, and request for updates of the packages that depend on csh.

Thinking a little bit on subject I'd say I object. There is a big
difference in size between csh and tcsh:
  -rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 130148 Янв 28 08:11 /bin/csh
  -rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 299136 Янв 28 08:13 /bin/tcsh
So tcsh is *2.3 times bigger* then csh. Of course, that's not a big pain
for current desktop or server systems. But gentoo is used for different
purposes... Also personally I like small system and I'm not using csh
for anything except for installing packages. So I do not need anything
except basic csh functionality. Thus for me it's better to leave csh and
remove tcsh (I know this is bad solution ;) ).

> Problem here is that creating a conditional symlink for csh -> tcsh is a
> bit dirty, and leaves the user with a system that has no csh in case the
> csh is unmerged after tcsh was installed.

To solve symlink problem I can suggest the following.
1. As it should be done now, tcsh should create symlink csh -> tcsh if
csh does not exist (in src_install()).

2. csh ebuild should create csh -> tcsh symlink if tcsh exist during
unmerge. This is possible with pkg_postrm:
pkg_postrm () {
    [ -e /bin/tcsh ] && ln -s /bin/tcsh /bin/csh
}

3. tcsh should remove csh -> tcsh symlink on unmerge. 
pkg_postrm () {
    [ -e /bin/tcsh ] && ln -s /bin/tcsh /bin/csh
}

Not a very clean solution, but works.

BTW. Why tcsh is a blocker for csh?

Peter.

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Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: tcsh vs. csh, removal of the latter

[Grobian]

On 28-01-2006 12:05:30 +0300, Peter Volkov (pva) wrote:
> On Срд, 2006-01-25 at 20:57 +0100, Grobian wrote:
> > Are there any objections to removing csh from the tree?  If there are no
> > problems with csh removal before Feb 1st 2006, then I will starting from
> > that date work on getting csh removed by masking it, blocking tcsh and
> > csh, and request for updates of the packages that depend on csh.
> 
> Thinking a little bit on subject I'd say I object. There is a big
> difference in size between csh and tcsh:
>   -rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 130148 Янв 28 08:11 /bin/csh
>   -rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 299136 Янв 28 08:13 /bin/tcsh
> So tcsh is *2.3 times bigger* then csh. Of course, that's not a big pain
> for current desktop or server systems. But gentoo is used for different
> purposes... Also personally I like small system and I'm not using csh
> for anything except for installing packages. So I do not need anything
> except basic csh functionality. Thus for me it's better to leave csh and
> remove tcsh (I know this is bad solution ;) ).

Well, tcsh is still small comparing to bash:
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 739936 Jul  7  2005 /bin/bash
or to put it in perspective:
% la -h /bin/bash /bin/tcsh
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 723K Jul  7  2005 /bin/bash
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 304K Dec 30 10:48 /bin/tcsh

And for the full picture:
% ls -la /bin/{sh,csh,bash,tcsh}
-r-xr-xr-x   1 root     bin       516392 Jan  6  2000 /bin/bash
-r-xr-xr-x   2 root     bin       159196 Nov 22  2002 /bin/csh
-r-xr-xr-x   4 root     root       95316 Nov  6  2002 /bin/sh
-r-xr-xr-x   1 root     bin       331332 Mar 15  2001 /bin/tcsh

In fact, I'd like to have only sh, because I never use bash.  However,
sh is quite picky and has some annoyances, that many people don't even
know of because they call bash sh.
I think that for csh and tcsh hold the same.  If people refer to csh,
they usually just mean tcsh.  (like vi means vim for most people ;) )

> > Problem here is that creating a conditional symlink for csh -> tcsh is a
> > bit dirty, and leaves the user with a system that has no csh in case the
> > csh is unmerged after tcsh was installed.
> 
> To solve symlink problem I can suggest the following.
> 1. As it should be done now, tcsh should create symlink csh -> tcsh if
> csh does not exist (in src_install()).
> 
> 2. csh ebuild should create csh -> tcsh symlink if tcsh exist during
> unmerge. This is possible with pkg_postrm:
> pkg_postrm () {
>     [ -e /bin/tcsh ] && ln -s /bin/tcsh /bin/csh
> }
> 
> 3. tcsh should remove csh -> tcsh symlink on unmerge. 
> pkg_postrm () {
>     [ -e /bin/tcsh ] && ln -s /bin/tcsh /bin/csh
> }
> 
> Not a very clean solution, but works.

It can work like this, but I'm not in favour of it.  Maybe someone with
some more experience with this kind of issues has come advice/comments
here.

> BTW. Why tcsh is a blocker for csh?

If tcsh just installs the symlink, it needs to block on csh, otherwise
collision-protect people will get an error during the merge phase.

Finally, csh and tcsh will always have to block each other, not because
of the symlink, but because they read the same config files, and I guess
that csh doesn't fully understand the tcsh config files.  Would be luck
if it would.  I just checked it, and no it doesn't.
We would for sure not be the only ones only to ship tcsh.

Thanks for your comments, though.


-- 
Fabian Groffen
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: tcsh vs. csh, removal of the latter

[Ciaran McCreesh]

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On Sat, 28 Jan 2006 10:31:55 +0100 Grobian <grobian@gentoo.org> wrote:
| In fact, I'd like to have only sh, because I never use bash.

How did you become a Gentoo developer?

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (King of all Londinium)
Mail            : ciaranm at gentoo.org
Web             : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm


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Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: tcsh vs. csh, removal of the latter

[Robin H. Johnson]

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On Sat, Jan 28, 2006 at 12:05:30PM +0300, Peter Volkov (pva) wrote:
> To solve symlink problem I can suggest the following.
Rather than handling it manually, perhaps eselect can help handle it
consistently, and allow users to switch when they have both csh and
tcsh installed.

-- 
Robin Hugh Johnson
E-Mail     : robbat2@gentoo.org
GnuPG FP   : 11AC BA4F 4778 E3F6 E4ED  F38E B27B 944E 3488 4E85

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Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: tcsh vs. csh, removal of the latter

[Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò]

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On Saturday 28 January 2006 10:47, Robin H. Johnson wrote:
> Rather than handling it manually, perhaps eselect can help handle it
> consistently, and allow users to switch when they have both csh and
> tcsh installed.
I started working on something like that for gtar/bsdtar, but I found that I 
don't have knowledge of eselect to do that, but this might be interesting in 
a generic way for alternatives, and I'd like to help if someone would start 
something.

-- 
Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò - http://dev.gentoo.org/~flameeyes/
Gentoo/ALT lead, Gentoo/FreeBSD, Video, AMD64, Sound, PAM, KDE

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Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: tcsh vs. csh, removal of the latter

[Grobian]

On 28-01-2006 09:38:05 +0000, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> On Sat, 28 Jan 2006 10:31:55 +0100 Grobian <grobian@gentoo.org> wrote:
> | In fact, I'd like to have only sh, because I never use bash.
> 
> How did you become a Gentoo developer?

Guess I forgot to put the word 'interactively' at the end of that
sentence.  :)


-- 
Fabian Groffen
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Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: tcsh vs. csh, removal of the latter

[Grobian]

On 28-01-2006 01:47:27 -0800, Robin H. Johnson wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 28, 2006 at 12:05:30PM +0300, Peter Volkov (pva) wrote:
> > To solve symlink problem I can suggest the following.
> Rather than handling it manually, perhaps eselect can help handle it
> consistently, and allow users to switch when they have both csh and
> tcsh installed.

I think this will make sense if we would rename csh to bsd-csh and then
let eselect handle the symlink for csh to bsd-csh or tcsh.

The question here now actually is: "is csh worth the hassle, or not?"
My opinion is that it is not.


-- 
Fabian Groffen
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Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: tcsh vs. csh, removal of the latter

[Marcelo Góes]

On 1/28/06, Grobian <grobian@gentoo.org> wrote:

> The question here now actually is: "is csh worth the hassle, or not?"
> My opinion is that it is not.

csh_is_not_worth_it++;
It is causing trouble and not adding functionality. Unless there are
cases where tcsh is not backwards compatible, I say it is a good
riddance.

--
Marcelo Góes
marcelogoes@gmail.com
vanquirius@gentoo.org

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Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: tcsh vs. csh, removal of the latter

[Mike Frysinger]

On Saturday 28 January 2006 12:30, Marcelo Góes wrote:
> On 1/28/06, Grobian <grobian@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > The question here now actually is: "is csh worth the hassle, or not?"
> > My opinion is that it is not.
>
> csh_is_not_worth_it++;
> It is causing trouble and not adding functionality. Unless there are
> cases where tcsh is not backwards compatible, I say it is a good
> riddance.

i say keeeeeeeeell it
-mike

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