>>>>> "Jim" == James Carlson <james.d.carlson at sun.com> writes:
Jim> I'd rather see a single ksh, based on this reasoning: if ksh93 is Jim> compatible enough that we're comfortable with inserting it as Jim> /usr/bin/ksh, then this means to me that there's no further purpose Jim> to the old Sun ksh except as a museum piece. If there is _any_ Jim> purpose to having access to the old Sun ksh, then I'd question Jim> whether we're all quite so confident that we're ready to do the Jim> replacement at all. One of the issues that occasionally floats to the surface is whether (and how many) customers really want the old ksh88 semantics. The thinking was, if most customers find the ksh88 semantics to be a lose on the whole (because it forces them to special-case Solaris), then maybe it's better to declare those semantics Obsolete. (And this is not just the project team. I saw a discussion among PSARC members along those lines.) The idea behind oksh was to provide a safety net for customers who can't (or won't) readily convert their scripts to ksh93. I haven't thought much about the big picture--what phases do things happen in, when does the ksh88/ksh93 compatibility issue have to be tackled, etc. The motivation for proposing oksh now was to give customers as much time as possible to convert their scripts, if that's what they want to do. But maybe that's premature, and the project team first needs to get permission to Obsolete ksh88 semantics. Jim> Moreover, if there are any "failure cases" that require switching Jim> back to oksh, then that's a disaster. Those failing scripts Jim> already refer directly to /usr/bin/ksh, and thus will be unfixable Jim> without changes. And if you're going to make changes, you might as Jim> well port the script to ksh93. Thus, keeping /usr/bin/oksh around Jim> doesn't even serve to mitigate problems. Converting the #! line to /usr/bin/oksh can be done mechanically, though I suppose there are probably gotchas that would make an update script a little more sophisticated than just running sed. Porting to ksh93 takes more thought. mike
