Consider installing the fish shell
Hello!
I have a feature request 
Could you consider installing it, please? Its auto completion is very good and a real help for productivity.
Thanks!
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i'm not super comfortable with this. my gut reaction is just to flatly say "no, wth is fish anyways, and why should i care", but that would not be nice.
so i've been trying to figure out a good reason to say no. here's what I went through:
- it's too big (5MB install size), kind of true
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it has too many dependencies, particularly a web browser (!?) andbcbcwould actually be a nice addition everywhere and is quite small (245KB installed), while we already do have a web browser installed everywhere (w3m) -
no one else uses it@gaba did a
so i dunno. do you need it everywhere? like would it be enough on the people.tpo box? or the build box? where would you actually use this?
added Needs Information label and removed Next label
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thousand paper cuts. we don't care about 5mb, we care about the 500+ packages we install by default on any new machine. if all of those are 5MB, it's 2.5GB gone right there from the start...
honestly, when i saw it depended on
www-browser, i was just "nope". then i realized we already had awww-browserinstalled everywhere (w3m) and then my reaction was "well, let's get rid of that too then"...why on earth do you need a web browser in your shell anyways?
(also note that fish is bigger than said web browser, w3m is only 2MB installed.)
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added Next label
my gut reaction is just to flatly say "no, wth is fish anyways, and why should i care", but that would not be nice.
I will read it as an attempt to be funny or to make your argument more interesting. But it could be read also as a scarce willingness to listen to people
it's too big (5MB install size), kind of true
thousand paper cuts. we don't care about 5mb, we care about the 500+ packages we install by default on any new machine. if all of those are 5MB, it's 2.5GB gone right there from the start...
As Richard said, are we really discussing for 5MB? (or more like 15MB, if you also count
fish-common).In case, let's use data.
pierov@perdulce:~$ df -h / Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sdb1 20G 3.2G 16G 17% / pierov@tb-build-05:~$ df -h / Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/mapper/vg_tbbuild05-root 30G 3.3G 25G 12% /We have 20-30GB for roots. Even with 10GB occupied by the default packages we'd still have plenty of remaining space.
Anyway, at the moment we are at slightly more than 3GB occupied. Why are we creating problems that aren't there?
it has too many dependencies, particularly a web browser (!?) and
bchttps://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell#dependencies
I don't see
bcin the list, and I cannot grep it in the default completions.As for the web browser, it is needed for the
fish_configtool and to read the documentation in the web format. It's an optional feature, but I guess it cannot be moved to a secondary package (fish_configisn't a real binary).like would it be enough on the people.tpo box? or the build box? where would you actually use this?
I'd love to have this on the build box, thank you.
people.tpo would be also nice, but I can live without it there if it is such a big problem.
BUT if this tool improves the experience that developers have in the servers then I think we should install it. We need to improve the dev experience on the building process.
Yes please! Fish has a lot of life quality improvements:
- the auto-completion is much better than bash in any possible way (it already knows a lot of commands, it always searches on history by default, it completes file names by searching also in the middle, not only at the beginning, completions are case-insensitive, it can parse man pages to remind you what flags do, etc etc)
- it uses colors so you have an immediate feedback if you are doing something wrong
- has a lot of default features that can prevent wasting a lot of time (for example, its prompt includes git information, which have saved me from doing a wrong thing more than once. I know that I could do the same on other shells, too, but it's only one example, I am possibly using more features without even realizing).
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my gut reaction is just to flatly say "no, wth is fish anyways, and why should i care", but that would not be nice.
I will read it as an attempt to be funny or to make your argument more interesting. But it could be read also as a scarce willingness to listen to people
I wish I would be funny, but I was just trying to be honest and explain why this trivial request is taking such a long time. You must also understand that there's a plethora of possible shells people might want, and we may not want to accomodate all of those requests forever.
It might seem obvious that fish is a great improvement, if you are using it every day. But I'm not a fish user, and it's the first time it's ever requested. You've requested to install it, without specifying where, so I was assuming you wanted it everywhere, which is why I had that knee-jerk reaction.
it's too big (5MB install size), kind of true
thousand paper cuts. we don't care about 5mb, we care about the 500+ packages we install by default on any new machine. if all of those are 5MB, it's 2.5GB gone right there from the start...
As Richard said, are we really discussing for 5MB? (or more like 15MB, if you also count
fish-common).We are.
In case, let's use data.
pierov@perdulce:~$ df -h / Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sdb1 20G 3.2G 16G 17% / pierov@tb-build-05:~$ df -h / Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/mapper/vg_tbbuild05-root 30G 3.3G 25G 12% /We have 20-30GB for roots. Even with 10GB occupied by the default packages we'd still have plenty of remaining space.
That's the data on the build servers, some servers are more constrained, including on the root filesystem. We constantly struggle with servers running out of disk space (as you probably know), so this matters to us.
Anyway, at the moment we are at slightly more than 3GB occupied. Why are we creating problems that aren't there?
it has too many dependencies, particularly a web browser (!?) and
bcThat's the upstream source, I'm refering to the Debian package:
https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/fish
I don't see
bcin the list, and I cannot grep it in the default completions.
As for the web browser, it is needed for the
fish_configtool and to read the documentation in the web format. It's an optional feature, but I guess it cannot be moved to a secondary package (fish_configisn't a real binary).Yeah, so I guess that's a problem with the Debian package, not fish itself. It does seem odd to have that hard depend.
like would it be enough on the people.tpo box? or the build box? where would you actually use this?
I'd love to have this on the build box, thank you.
people.tpo would be also nice, but I can live without it there if it is such a big problem.
That can be done too.
BUT if this tool improves the experience that developers have in the servers then I think we should install it. We need to improve the dev experience on the building process.
Yes please! Fish has a lot of life quality improvements:
- the auto-completion is much better than bash in any possible way (it already knows a lot of commands, it always searches on history by default, it completes file names by searching also in the middle, not only at the beginning, completions are case-insensitive, it can parse man pages to remind you what flags do, etc etc)
- it uses colors so you have an immediate feedback if you are doing something wrong
- has a lot of default features that can prevent wasting a lot of time (for example, its prompt includes git information, which have saved me from doing a wrong thing more than once. I know that I could do the same on other shells, too, but it's only one example, I am possibly using more features without even realizing).
I'm not sure I should get into debating the merits of this or that shell. I understand that fish has stellar completion and colors, but I will point out that this is the kind of stuff that gets zsh users really proud as well, and we do have zsh installed on all servers, possibly for that exact reason.
And this is why I'm hesitant in adding more shells: everyone has their favorite one, and you can't expect every server on the internet to have yours.
I've personnally stopped caring about the remote shell and basically do everything locally and sync stuff up. This way I don't need to assume the remote environment is setup in such or such way. Sometimes i do drop into a shell of course, and then I find it a little confusing, but it beats having to argue with all my coworkers about how this alias is missing or that prompt should be... ;)
Anyways, this is all precious, wasted time right now. I'll just install fish on your build servers and people.tpo and be done with it.
a.
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On 2022-08-16 08:45:29, Pier Angelo Vendrame (@pierov) wrote:
-- Antoine Beaupré torproject.org system administration
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this is now fixed and should propagate on all relevant servers within the next 4h.
origin/master 0e5ef0e3873dd3588f28731764a0d6109376cec2 Author: Antoine Beaupré <anarcat@debian.org> Date: Tue Aug 16 09:57:26 2022 -0400 Parent: 7eb92d93 people.tpo is really a shell server Merged: master Contained: master install fish on shell (chives and perdulce) and tb_build servers fish is an extra shell which adds somewhere between 5 and 15MB of disk usage, and requires extra dependencies. The most notable are `bc` (which is not installed yet, but is a good improvement) and `www-browser` (which, oddly, we have one installed everywhere: w3m). We don't install fish everywhere because of the latter: we don't want to be force to have a web browser installed everywhere. Technically, the dependency is optional upstream, but it's actually a hard dependency in the Debian package (`Depends`). I've filed this as a bug in Debian (https://bugs.debian.org/1017464) to see if that can be fixed as well. In the meantime, let's keep the blast radius a little smaller and keep this restricted to a handful of servers. 2 files changed, 3 insertions(+) modules/profile/manifests/shell.pp | 2 ++ modules/profile/manifests/torbrowser_build.pp | 1 + modified modules/profile/manifests/shell.pp @@ -2,4 +2,6 @@ class profile::shell { include profile::mosh include profile::world_open_ssh + # an extra shell for power users tpo/tpa/team#40854 + package { 'fish': } } modified modules/profile/manifests/torbrowser_build.pp @@ -6,6 +6,7 @@ class profile::torbrowser_build { ensure_packages([ 'build-essential', 'diffoscope', + 'fish', # requested in tpo/tpa/team#40854 'git', 'libdata-dump-perl', 'libdata-uuid-perl',notice that i filed a bug against the debian package to downgrade the www-browser dependency.
mentioned in issue #41781
marked this issue as related to #41781
