[humorix] Red Hat Nullifies Differences Between bash, csh

[James Baughn <jbaughn@ldd.net>]

Red Hat Nullifies Differences Between bash, csh 
September 25, 2002

In a move that has outraged some hard-core Linux users, Red
Hat Software has revealed that future versions of the
distribution will hide the differences between command-line
user interfaces, creating a "more unified shell prompt
experience".  

"I don't mind if they rebrand and unify the GNOME and KDE
interfaces," said one Linux longhair.  "Frankly, I rarely
use GUIs.  But when they start messing with my CLI, then
it's personal.  I'm not going to sit here and let Red Hat
infect my beloved tcsh with those annoying quirks from
bash."

While a newbie Linux user might not be able to tell the
difference between a csh and a sea shell, serious users
don't want to relearn a whole new command-line interface. 
"I've memorized every nuance of bash," one old-timer said. 
"And here Red Hat comes along and combines features from
bash, csh, ksh, and zsh and repackages it as 'rhash'.  I'm
not going to waste my time trying to figure out 'rhash' and
get confused."

The nullified CLI isn't the only new feature that has upset
some users. Red Hat has also rebranded vi and emacs to
create two virtually identical text editors: "vimacs" and
"emavics".  

"We wanted to unify the text editing interface experience
to help prevent confusion and solve maintenance headaches,"
Red Hat explained in a public statement.  "Over the years,
we've received nearly 1,000 technical support calls from
people that have accidentally started vi and couldn't
figure out how to do anything -- or even how to quit. By
nullifying the differences between the two text editors, we
were able to make vi more user friendly while trimming down
the bloat from emacs. It's a win-win situation."

Typical users will be oblivious to this change unless they
accidentally click on the emacs icons from their KDNOME
desktop.  Nevertheless, not everybody will accept this
change without a fight.  The head  of the Emacs Flame War
Re-enactment Society (a group that re-enacts the great
Usenet emacs versus vi flames wars of the 20th Century)
said, "Red Hat is destroying our cultural heritage!  Emacs,
vi, and bash are historical landmarks that should not be
touched, rebranded, rewritten, or cleaned up for the
benefit of lusers and PHBs too dense to understand the
concept of 'insert mode'."

Industry observers don't expect that Red Hat will suffer
any negative consequences from its controversial
decisions.  "Life-free geeks who care about this stuff all
use Debian or Slackware anyway.  This is yet another
attempt to portray Red Hat as 'Redmond Hat' bent on the
total Microsoftization of the Linux community, something
that simply isn't going to happen -- at least not for a few
more years..."
--
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