IN some instance tcsh will not have history regardless of what history is set to. Usually happens when there is some type of error when sourcing glaobel rc scripts (why is this? csh doesn't have this issue.) In this case, /etc/profile.d/lang.csh has han unset env variable $LINGUAS in certain cases (i have had it happen in text console mode or when logged in as root. Not when GNOME was running as a user.) Default accounts started with bash shells and were then chsh'ed to /bin/tcsh. Can the unset LINGUAS variable be fixed and more importantly, why does tcsh give up on history if it runs into an error parsong rc files?
As far as I can see, ~/.history is not read when an error occurs in rc scripts in both csh and tcsh, please provide specifics steps to reproduce if you see a difference. The rationale for this is (besides "legacy behavior") that you could be changing $histfile in your rc scripts, so reading ~/.history might not be what you want. Unsetting $LINGUAS in /etc/profile.d/lang.csh seems wrong: (info gettext) describes LINGUAS as a maximal set of languages for which translations are installed; unsettting LINGUAS if $LINGUAS == $LANG is unexpected; the same thing happens in /etc/profile.d/lang.sh. Reassigning to initscripts for the LINGUAS issue.
Fixed in CVS.