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

[Ondrej Vasik]

On Thu, 2013-08-22 at 08:21 -0500, Chris Adams wrote:
> 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.

I agree that opening square bracket is useless, but I want to have the
directory and $/# character separated. This prompt is well established,
however I agree that we can probably get one character less with
something like 
foo at localhost lib>$

> - 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\$ '

Good suggestion, I like it - and maybe it would make sense to change the
default to this if wider audience will agree on that. 
Still I don't agree that this is useless - I usually have several
terminals with ssh connection and they are differentiated in user (e.g.
per tool I'm using on that machine). Having only hostname will make it
harder for me (as the hostnames differ only in number). Most of the
users probably don't have this scenario, so I'm a bit toward to +1 here.

Greetings,
         Ondrej