Bryan Cantrill <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > But I went googling for differences and found a pretty significant one:
> >
> > It looks like ksh88 uses dynamic scoping while ksh93 uses lexical
> > scoping. As I understand it, a similar disagreement caused something of
> > a schism within the lisp community.
> >
> > This won't matter for many scripts. But any script which uses local
> > variables may well trip over this, and the behavior change will be hard
> > to diagnose if you're not aware of the incompatibility.
>
> Bill's argument is not a theoretical one; these changes _do_ matter and
> they _do_ break people. As one example, Tim Bray took Solaris to task
> for not supporting "%" as an alias for "%%" in bash:
>
> http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/02/27/Linux-Solaris
There is a big difference between the bash case and the ksh case.
For bash there is a legal source available and it is possible to retain
compatibility. But even with bash: if Sun does not inform us about propblems
we OpenSolaris developers will use the offocial source and if this causes a
problem and if Sun Solaris thus deviates from e.g. SchilliX, it is a failure
at Suns side and not a failure from the SchilliX development.
For ksh88 there is no legal source and from my understanding there is not
even the possibility to redistribute binaries.
If Sun believes that there are problems with incmpatibilities, Sun would first
need to identify all possible incompatibilities. The next task could be to
decide whether to live with the incompatibilties and to change to ksh93
immediately or to provide a legal backward compatible solution based on ksh93
sources.
Note that we OpenSolaris developers have no choice! We need to supply a ksh
with OpenSolaris and the only legal ksh for ur is ksh93.
If Sun does not like to deviate from OpenSolaris based distros like SchilliX,
it is up to Sun to provide a legal solutuion.
Let me note about another problem:
I did try to discuss important issues several times and have been ignored.
When I later tried to use a more direct and explicit wording, I have been
personally attacked by people (although not from Sun).
There are a lot of issues we need to solve with OpenSolaris. If it is
impossible to discuss these issues, I need to decide myself. Note that if
there is no reaction on an attempt to discuss things and if I thus decided
myself, I would call this a vote for my proposal by abstinence.
Jörg
--
EMail:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (uni)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/old/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
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