User talk:Enterprisey

re: SSH keys

Hi there! I want to provide a little more contextualization for Special:Diff/767954 that I could not fit in the edit summary. When it comes to directing the user to set an environment variable, historically we have not hesitated to name a specific way. Here are some issues that come up with this:

• It doesn't account for alternate shells very well. Even though a user of, say, fish can simply click on the environment variable page to learn more (pretending that fish is mentioned there), there are likely going to be inconsistencies in how this is applied. Given how often environment variables come up, there are bound to be cases where, instead of putting the Bash and zsh files, one just puts the Bash one, or does Bash and the legacy ~/.profile. I think the most *consistent* solution will be to "refactor" out the instruction to another page (environment variable), and link to that instead of trying to reproduce the overview.
  • I do need to caveat this by saying, yes, when we link to a more complicated page, often we do provide a small "example" that may serve as the kind of summary I am arguing against. I believe that that's different just because of how common this case is, and the next point.
• It's a big mess when the example we paste everywhere turns out to be bad. At a point in the past, in many places we (correctly) directed users to simply stick things into ~/.pam_environment. However, this eventually became deprecated and is now totally dysfunctional. Since we did not have everything defer to environment variable for specific instructions, it became a mess of going around the whole wiki to fix specific references to that filename.

I hope this makes things feel less arbitrary; let me know if there is anything else that I can elaborate on. -- CodingKoopa (talk) 01:53, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

CodingKoopa, that makes perfect sense and the most recent change looks good. I should've guessed that you were trying to keep the "how to export" docs centralized and I apologize for not helping with that goal. Enterprisey (talk) 02:25, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

Sure thing, thank you for understanding :) -- CodingKoopa (talk) 05:25, 19 February 2023 (UTC)