Wider feedback requested on two changes to our base/core defaults

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" <johannbg at gmail.com> said:
> You would just overwrite in in your own .bashrc if you have long
> hostname and they get in your way.
> 
> Long hostnames are far more practical for administrators to use then
> short hostnames have ever been.

That's your opinion; please don't state it as if it is an agreed-upon
fact.  Mine differs; personal like/dislike is not a good reason to
change existing defaults.

Some people have long domain names (and not just a lot of dotted
components, but long individual sections); taking up a bunch of space on
every prompt line just to re-print the same domain is a waste.  However,
even with a short domain, it is just too much IMHO (and I worked for
several years for someone with just about as short of a domain name as
you can get).

I find the Red Hat/Fedora default prompt too long already; IMHO:

- The square brackets are useless wrapping; there's also a
  character+space separator at the end of the prompt.

- The "user@" is mostly useless; if you su/sudo to root, the character
  at the end of the prompt changes from $ to #.  The only time I would
  be interested in seeing user@ is if I've su/sudo to a user (other than
  root) that doesn't match the login user for this TTY; on Linux this
  can be as easy as the following bit of bash:

	local user=""
	if [ "$UID" != 0 -a ! -O /proc/self/fd/0 ]; then
  		user='\u@'
	fi
	PS1="$user"'\h \W\$ '

-- 
Chris Adams <linux at cmadams.net>