[Xquartz-dev] 2.3.2_rc4

[Harald Hanche-Olsen]

+ Nicholas Riley <njriley at uiuc.edu>:

> On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 09:42:28AM +0100, Harald Hanche-Olsen wrote:
>> 
>> That way, knowledgeable people with weird shells or odd 
>> requirements can customize their X11 environment to their hearts' 
>> content.
> 
> I'm not sure tcsh or zsh should really be considered a weird shell.

Those weren't the shells I had in mind. How about rc or es? I don't
consider es weird - it is my login shell after all - but users of
those other shells you mentioned might think it is. Or how about scsh?
Is that weird enough for you?

> Anyway as long as you're launching a shell script you might as well
> support the shells included with OS X (i.e., contents of /etc/shells),
> and execute the user's selected $SHELL.

Surprise: On my machine, /etc/shells lists a shell not included with
OS X. Its syntax is sufficiently different from sh/csh/zsh that
treating it as a generic shell will almost certainly fail.

What I am saying is that building a command and blindly feeding it to
$SHELL is a singularly bad idea. I don't know if that is what you were
suggesting, but if it was, don't go there.

- Harald

PS. Off topic gratuitous anecdote: When I first found out about
Automator, I thought this looked neat, so I tried putting together
some simple automator workflow. Now as part of that I wanted a shell
command, but no matter what I tried, I couldn't even drag a shell
script action into the workflow. In the end I narrowed it down to the
fact that I was using an oddball login shell. I walked away from my
little experiment in disgust and haven't looked at Automator since.
That is the sort of trouble you get for making assumptions about shell
syntax, I imagine. (No, I never managed to find out what it was that
automator tried to do that would fail with my shell.)