On 16/09/2007, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Shawn, > > >> 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. > > > > A consensus among our community, not some other community, at least > > from what I've seen. Bash is already there if people want to use it. > > Sorry, could you point me to the consensus to use ksh93 instead of bash > for the /bin/sh replacement (to be clear we're talking about that shell > rather the default root shell or the default shell that new users get?)
That's my informal guess based on comments on the lists. I've only seen the advocacy of bash by a few. In fact, many folks I've seen post here use neither bash or ksh. > > Not any more than it does now. The people that created this problem > > are the idiots that put #!/bin/sh at the top of their script and > > assume that means bash, when it obviously isn't. > > I sympathize but if the predominant amount of software being designed > today that's actually written for the Bourne shell assumes Bash, then > we're just making it that more difficult to get that software running > under OpenSolaris. ...and we're making it more difficult to port open source software by being truly POSIX compliant, having a different compiler, having a different sound interface, and on an on the list goes. > And besides, what about those persons (I'm not going to characterize > them as idiots) who put #!/bin/sh at the top of their script and assume > that means ksh93. when it obviously isn't? Those are people that should be paper cut repeatedly with a printout of their own code :) > Does anyone want to take a stab at articulating in a calm and precise > manner the positive and negative attributes of these shells? And what > about Zsh or Ash or Dash? Some of the things that I'm interested in > understanding from a scripting language perspective are To me, that's perfectly valid! I'm not hellbent on ksh as the default shell. In fact, bash could be the default shell as far as I'm concerned. It just can't be /bin/sh, of course nothing else can to me either. In my view, /bin/sh must be a POSIX-compliant shell that is backwards compatible with the existing one. > From a distro perspective, who uses what for /bin/sh? > > From an ISV perspective, which shell-specific constructs are > assumed to be available in /bin/sh? > > From a standards compatibility perspective, for which standards > does the shell implement and has been tested with? > > From a long-term compatibility perspective with itself, how > compatible and stable have successive releases of a particular > shell been? > > A related question is what sort of development is taking place > in each of the communities and regardless of the interesting > things taking place there, what developments might actually > improve the OpenSolaris /bin/sh from a scripting perspective. > > Hmm, perhaps we should draw up a list of requirements around the system > shell and then start the discussion there? :-) I believe Roland already touched on this a few times. But that list is a great start. If I remember correctly, Roland pointed out several flaws that we need to be rectified in bash before it would be considered an acceptable replacement: 1) when invoked as /bin/sh that it would have to run in full POSIX compliance mode 2) A few POSIX compliance issues need resolving still 3) Very poor multi-lingual support in some areas 4) Abysmal performance in some areas If someone can make the changes necessary to bash to address all of those issues, plus make it fully compatible with the existing /bin/sh, then we might have a winner. Until those changes happen though, ksh93 is much closer to meeting all of those goals than it is. -- 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
