On 4/21/06, James Carlson <james.d.carlson at sun.com> wrote: > In other words, the solutions that make sense to me are: > > 1. /usr/bin/ksh stays the same, and /usr/bin/ksh93 is shipped as > the new ksh93. Perhaps someday the two converge again, but not > now.
That's bollocks. May I remind you that the RFE in your bug database is from the last century? How long should the customers of Solaris wait? Ten more years? Until David Korn is dead? When? >From the point of view of a software vendor this is still UNACCEPTABLE as each piece of code needs to be reviewed whether it uses /bin/ksh or /bin/ksh93. Again, the interoperability issue is there: Neither Linux or Mac OSX ship with something called /bin/ksh93. > 2. /usr/bin/ksh is replaced by a suitably modified (to be > compatible) variant of ksh93. The old Sun ksh is sent to the > great bit-bucket in the sky. > > I don't see a self-consistent case where we're both confident enough > to replace /usr/bin/ksh but not so confident that we can't let go of > oksh. And who is going to maintain such a version? I doubt Korn Shell maintainers will tolerate such patches and Sun will have to maintain again their own breed of ksh, something which contradicts idea to "lower the burden" on the side of Sun. The Sun version of /bin/ksh will differ AGAIN from all other versions of Unix. The result will be a chimera which is not going to serve anyone except the religion of downward compatibility at all costs. And I doubt that this will be in the interests of your customers. > I'd prefer (2), as I'd like to see us get rid of the old stuff as soon > as possible. And how should this help software developers? A version of SunKsh93 which differs significantly from the version shipped by other operating systems is IMO NOT better than the current version of ksh delivered with Solaris. Irek
