On 16/09/2007, Roger Marquis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> A consensus for ksh? Among what audience? > > Read the scope thread in > > http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/indiana-discuss/ > > The question still begs, among what audience. The answer is that the > largest potential user-base, currently running linux and freebsd, are not > among those requesting ksh. > > > Neither bash nor tcsh are POSIX shells. tcsh is even worse than bash > > as all system scripts will break, bash just breaks 90% of them. > > You're confusing /bin/sh, the default script shell, with the > shell specified in /etc/passwd. Nobody has proposed using tcsh, or any > csh variant, as a scripting shell. Enough obfuscation already. > > > RH, Suse, Ubuntu, Mandrake and Debian ship ksh93 as /usr/bin/ksh by default. > > Maybe if you install everything by default, but that's not the standard. > `which ksh` under standard RH (f7) and Debian (4.0) installs returns: > > ksh: Command not found. > > >> 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. > > > > Ah I think you still live in the 80' since you would've noticed that > > it has floating point math, functions, multidimensional arrays and > > much more. This isn't ksh88 anymore you may remember, we're talking > > about ksh93. > > The answer doesn't address the question, evidently to avoid discussion of > the primary theme of the prior post: > > compatibility > > 99.999% of systems programmers who need multidimensional arrays will use > perl, python, or ruby. Those using ksh will not expect their scripts to > work cross-platform. It's exactly this mindset that has reduced Solaris' > market share to the single digits.
This is an OpenSolaris list, not a Solaris list. Solaris' popularity can be attributed to other, bigger decisions made by Sun which are outside the scope of this list. I think it would be a logical phallacy to somehow imply that Solaris' popularity failure was because /bin/bash wasn't the default shell. I think that existing evidence speaks otherwise (i.e. killing of the x86 version for a while...). -- Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/ "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. " --Donald Knuth _______________________________________________ indiana-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/indiana-discuss
