Shell independence in programming groups

Question

Our programming environment is dependent upon certain environment variables being set. For example, to use distcc, one needs to define the DISTCC_HOSTS environment variable. The way we handle this is forcing each developer to source a global tcshrc file upon invoking a new shell. The global tcshrc file contains statements to set the environment variables up (among other things).

However, this is awfully discriminatory as each developer is forced to use tcsh since setting an environment variable is different per shell.

The most obvious solution to this problem to have corresponding global bashrc and zshrc files, but that of course becomes cumbersome since now we have to maintain three different files all containing the same logic.

Are there any clean solutions to solve this sort of situation?

Answer 1

Once you have source the global tcshrc (which you should not need to do (put some commands in $(HOME)/.tcshrc to do the work)).

All you have to do is start your favorite shell.
Your shell will then inherit all the environment from its parent.

> source /bla/tcshrc
> bash
bash >

In-fact you can do this all in your .tcshrc file:

# Set up your environment
source /bla/tcshrc
# Start your favorite shell here
bash
# When bash exits this shell exits.
# I would not do this last line but for compleness
exit

Answer 2

You could write a script that contains the environment information and generates the correct .whatever for the corresponding shell.

Answer 3

A simple solution would be to use some neutral format for environment variable definitions, e.g. in some file env.file

VARIABLE value

and to generate the setup scripts for different shells automatically, e.g. for bash

awk '{ print "export "$1"="$2 }' < env.file > bashrc

or for tcsh

awk '{ print "setenv", $1", "$2 }' < env.file > tcshrc

This seems to actually be one of cases where a programmatic solution does solve a social problem.