On 9/16/07, Roger Marquis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Brandorr wrote:
> > ===Q: Why doesn't /bin/sh point to bash?===
> > A: Solaris uses the Bourne shell (/bin/sh) as the default system shell
> > to satisfy backward compatibility with historic releases of Solaris.
> > There is work being planned to replace the Bourne shell with a generic
> > POSIX compliant shell. Whether that is an updated bash running in
> > POSIX compatibility mode, or another shell such as ksh93 is still an
> > open question. Either option require additional coding resources to
> > implement.
>
> The default system shell, as specified in /etc/passwd, is used _only_ for
> command line access. As such it really should be something more modern than
> Bourne's sh. The default script shell, OTOH, is and always has been
> /bin/sh. Hard to see any case for changing that (from a posix-compliant
> version, not that I'm a fan of posix. Few organizations have been as
> unfriendly to backwards-compatibility as posix).
>
> > ===Q: Why isn't bash the default system shell?===
> > A: There is a consensus building to use a modern/user-friendly default
> > system shell, such as bash or ksh93, but the integration and
> > compatibility changes required have yet to be done.
>
> A consensus for ksh? Among what audience? Couldn't be the vast majority of
> potential OpenSolaris users, currently about running bash (90%) and tcsh
> (9%), in Linux and *BSD respectively.
>
> The only real problem with ksh is that scripts written to it won't run on
> most other platforms. Is there any *bsd or Linux that includes a ksh
> by default?
>
> Reason for this is that the _most_ important feature of a programming
> shell is compatibility. People who want advanced features use scripting
> languages like perl, python, and ruby, not shells.
>
> IMO, Sun's current market share (in the low single digits) is due to a
> persistent disregard for cross-platform compatibility. Religious arguments
> aside, making ksh the default anything will only have a negative impact on
> compatibility, and market share.
I forgot to say: bash was released under the GNU General Public
License and core parts of Solaris MUST NOT depend on GPL. The GNU
readline library was banned from Solaris for this reason and expect
that bash remains bundled as 3rd party component but not as a core
application
Cheers,
William
--
@,,@ William James
(\--/) [EMAIL PROTECTED]
(.>__<.) GNU/Solaris hacker
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