Felix Schulte <felix.schulte at gmail.com> wrote:
> > In my experience,
> > Solaris ksh is a stable shell that has always served me well.
> Yes, but it is not serving much well anymore. And the resources to
> maintain it are not available, neither Sun nor the community has the
> strength to maintain this nightmare.
>
> > I would not like to see it dropped; to the contrary, I would
> > like to see an open source version of it.
> Please no. It would generate another burden for the community. IMO
> there are not enough people to work on both ksh88 and ksh93 and ksh93
> is DEFINITELY the future. We have to look forward. Looking backwards
> isn't wrong - but in this case it will likely be FATAL for the
> OpenSolaris project.
>
> > So please release both ksh88 and ksh93 as open source and let
> > people choose their preference on their own.
> ksh88 will likely not be released as open source. Doing so may damage
> OpenSolaris in the long term. And neither Sun nor the community has
> the resources to deal with it.
Felix, the fact that a person like you about whom a web search
does not locate a single line of production code is trying to
tell open source programmers like me what projects they should
work on, or, even worse, what projects they should not work on,
is ludicrous, if not an outright impudence. Stop this.
You may even be right that it is doubtable if the OpenSolaris
community has the resources to maintain ksh88, since there are
far too many people like you who are advocating, politicizing,
hailing, etc., and far too less people who actually write code
(other than Sun engineers). It gets even worse when people like
you distract others from writing code by making such statements.
But that problem is in no way specific to ksh88.
I repeat that I would be willing to spend some of my (private)
time maintaining an open source version of ksh88. A view at my
record of past projects should make it clear enough that I am
serious when I say that. But I am really not willing to waste
my time arguing with a prater.
Gunnar
