Some comments about screen-profiles

I am experienced screen user who has some minor comments about screen-profiles. Not sure this is the best place to put them but did not want to raise a bug/wish.

I only stumbled across the new screen-profiles function reading somewhere about jaunty. The words said that users will see screen-profiles "the first time they run screen on jaunty". Well I'd run screen plenty of times on jaunty and seen nothing new! It turned out that because I already had a ~/.screenrc screen-profiles was ignoring me. It seems to me that the new user test should be the non-existence of ~/.screen-profiles/? I did see a bug somewhere where an experienced screen user was complaining that he should not even be bothered by the screen-profiles prompt even once in his life so this is probably where the test was changed but that one user's opinion is arguably not valid for most others? screen-profiles is quite a fundamental change (e.g. /usr/bin/screen is not a script, not the screen binary) so it is useful if experienced screen users are made aware of these changes.

It would help experienced users in there was a simple description somewhere of how screen-profiles links into his home environment. The first description I found in google was the ubuntu wiki at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ScreenProfiles but the description there is wrong and quite confusing. It says that select-screen-profile "will establish a symbolic link to that profile in the user's ~/.screenrc-profile, which will be sourced in their ~/.screenrc." Well that is certainly not the case for me. My ~/.screenrc has no source statement at all. It turns out that there is a new /usr/bin/script which looks at ~/.screen-profiles/ first. This flow sequence (aka black magic) should be made very clear, particularly for experienced screen users. What happens does not match man screen. Indeed man screen doesn't even mention screen-profiles!

There are some usability issues which I forecast will have bugs raised on them (I'm using 1.52-0ubuntu1~ppa3) . I won't mention them all here but one example if the updates-available notification. I saw I had one package to update (screen-profiles!) and after updating I still had the notification remaining. Only after I looked at the actual script did I see that it only updates once per hour. The logged in user count seems to bounce around. When I log into my remote server over a slowish ssh connection I see a heap of transient "Use exit to leave the shell" messages scroll down my screen just before screen gets auto started. I don't see these when I log in without screen-profiles starting by default at login. Performance seems noticeably slower when using screen-profiles compared to vanilla screen over this slowish link.

After saying all this I still quite like this new screen-profiles facility. The information displayed is useful.