"I. Szczesniak" <iszczesniak at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Solaris ksh is Solaris-only - it has no "upstream" and Sun engineers
> > > have all the burden of maintaing it. I've heared lots of complains in
> > > the past about this maintaince nightmare called /usr/bin/ksh from Sun
> > > engineers... ;-(
> > > And Sun's bug database is still full of unfixed bugs which no longer
> > > exist in ksh93...
> > > The introduction of ksh93 (and depreciation of /usr/bin/oksh (= current
> > > Solaris /usr/bin/ksh)) would be another good opportuniny for Sun to save
> > > lots of engineering time in the long term.
> >
> > I doubt that. ksh93 has bugs on its own. Sun will have the choice to
> > either wait for an upstream bug fix or to get its engineers to handle
> > it in-house. But then, have a look at the ksh93 source code. In case
> > the ksh88 code should really be a nightmare, what is the ksh93 code
> > with its close integration to large libraries such as libast and its
> > very special build environment?
>
> Invalid arguments.
> The build system can be worked around or fixed as in MacOS X. libast
> may be statically linked if it does not make sense to make it a public
> API. The only thing which is likely going to be exposed is libshell.
The point is that one might have to go deep into the internals
of libast in order to find a bug. How it is linked is irrelevant
to this issue.
> > What I can feel in this debate is a lot of politics. There are
> > obviously people who want to deploy ksh93 for many good reasons.
> > I do not want to oppose against that; I think it would be a
> > very good thing to deliver /usr/bin/ksh93 for those who want
> > to use it.
> And then? Do you really want to *force* the community to be stuck in
> the past with a ksh version which is a usability, interoperability,
> maintainer and portability nightmare?
Obviously not. I do not want to force anybody to do anything.
That was exactly the point I was trying to make.
> > that has always served me well.
> > I would not like to see it dropped; to the contrary, I would
> > like to see an open source version of it.
>
> No, thanks.
>
> >
> > So please release both ksh88 and ksh93 as open source and let
> > people choose their preference on their own.
>
> What is your proposal ? To release ancient code which is not
> compatible to anything, causing a significant maintainer,
> interoperability and portability burden to the community?
> No, thanks.
Just releasing the code does not hurt; nobody is forced to
maintain it.
> The current Solaris community does *not* have the power to handle two
> versions of ksh. We either have to decide whether we want to go
> forward (ksh93) or stay in the past (current Solaris /usr/bin/ksh).
I am not the Solaris community, but I would definitively be
willing to maintain a version of ksh88. What you or your
company are interested in is completely irrelevant to me,
though. That is how things can be in the open source world.
Gunnar
