On 4/24/06, James Carlson <james.d.carlson at sun.com> wrote:
> Felix Schulte writes:
> > > 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.
> > I hope you are aware of the consequences of such a step? The inability
> > of Sun to deliver a decent version of ksh as /usr/bin/ksh already
> > DAMAGED the reputation of Sun and Solaris. How much further should
> > this go?
>
> And why, precisely, did you snip away option (2) from my list? And
> why did you delete the part where I noted that I prefer that option?
Because I didn't read it yet. Option (1) was horrific enough and
required a response. Besides: Option (2) sucks, too. Do you really
think that replacing one Sun-only version of ksh with another Sun-only
version of ksh makes the situation better? I doubt it.
>
> I don't believe that inflammatory statements about reputation are
> helpful here. I fully agree that Sun's ksh is stale. In fact, I've
> said so multiple times. I don't see what more I could possibly do to
> show that I understand that issue, or illustrate that I understand the
> "consequences" of failing to solve that problem.
One very tiny example to illustrate the reason why I learned to hate
Sun ksh. Together with other students I am in charge of a large
machine cluster in our university which stretches over many users
(getent passwd | wc -l says 18527), machines and operating systems. In
theory it would be a perfect world if there wasn't a problem called
Sun ksh which is a total pain in the ass. Log in scripts which work on
Darwin, AIX, Freebsd and Linux generate syntax errors when users log
in into Solaris. And there is no way around it - except by rewriting
each script in the bourne shell syntax (which sucks) or use bash for
user accounts (sucks too). Only because Sun is apparently not able to
handle the problem themselves and dumps the smelling trash called Sun
/bin/ksh in front of my door and even refuse the responsibility for
it. Fun, isn't it? :(
--
_ Felix Schulte
_|_|_ mailto:felix.schulte at gmail.com
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ooO--(_)--Ooo
