Darren J Moffat wrote:
> James Carlson wrote:
>> Garrett D'Amore writes:
>>> Have the upstream providers given thought to dealing with changes
>>> like this and their impact on already-deployed scripts? (Maybe
>>> there aren't any that we care about yet, since our ksh93 is still so
>>> new.)
>>
>> We've already had such problems. See CR 6667990 for one such
>> accident; you can't call your local function "start" and upgrade
>> safely from Sun's old ksh88 to ksh93.
>>
>>> I'm concerned, going forward, as ksh93 syntax becomes more
>>> prevalent, that bringing in changes like the above may have
>>> unintended consequences in scripts or even ON delivered components,
>>> which we cannot easily find or test.
>>
>> This probably isn't a good place to design a solution, but I share the
>> sense of unease. It puts script writers on shaky ground if they can't
>> either specify a known environment or predict what's "safe."
>
> While I agree with you both I don't think this ARC review is the place
> to design the ksh93 language evolution. It is what it is, we can
> either choose to take it as it is or we can step back and do ksh93
> what we did to ksh88 (abandon it basically). Or we can ask the
> upstream (who hang out here I believe) to take this on board and
> consider it.
All I'm asking for is that consideration. I agree that we don't need to
solve it here, because at this point we don't have any lasting
commitment that we've delivered to customers yet around ksh93.
I'd be quite happy with a statement from the project team (or the
upstream sources!) that they will take this into consideration before
the next round of language enhancements.
>
> While it is ksh93 I don't think any of this really matters that much
> because you have to explicitly ask for ksh93. On the other hand if
> this same implementation was exporting this same functionality by
> default when it was used as the implementation of /bin/sh I would feel
> very differently. This still isn't the case to make ksh93
> /usr/bin/ksh which is where I think this type of issue matters most.
I thought that in OpenSolaris 2008.05, ksh93 is the default shell. I
still haven't installed it myself, since I have dependencies on newer
kernel bits than are in OpenSolaris 2008.05.
Of course, if we're not encouraging folks to use ksh93 instead of
/bin/sh or /bin/ksh, then I agree, none of this matters, and we can
dispense with it in the same terms that we dispensed with bash.
(Although I'd then request we reconsider the commitment level given to
ksh93 -- perhaps in such a case External might be better.)
-- Garrett
