> Why? My assumption, that this is for testing future changes in > Solaris. Without doing shell script execution speed testing, I don't > think this is a good idea.
First of all, as with any of the changes we've been pushing out in the prototype releases this is a bit of an experiment. If it doesn't provide a useful improvement, it won't be carried forward to OpenSolaris when it integrates into the usual consolidation. I'm concerned as well about potential performance impact and obviously performance testing will need to be done before this committed into a consolidation. > (In Ubuntu they now are moving away from using bash as sh, and use a > shell called dash (the Debian Almquist Shell), which is a stripped > down, bourne shell like shell that aims to simply be a Posix shell > with a minimum of bells and whistles.) I did do a little investigation of incorporating something like dash or another Almquist relative shell and though they're small size is welcome, it seemed more interesting to try and see how well ksh93 might perform as a /bin/sh replacement. > Keep in mind our sh is still actively being developed, with recent > work starting to improve execution speed via the inclusion of dtrace > probes. Although I think it's fantastic to see the recent DTrace work, let's not kid ourselves. As far as I can tell, it's one of the very few improvements to the crusty old Solaris Bourne shell in the past decade (or even longer). And I would expect the same types of probes can also be made to ksh93 (plus an even richer set). Korn Shell 93 promises to have a much more fertile software development in the next couple of years and there actually seems to be work being done both within the OpenSolaris community and outside. Although I think some of the claims made by Korn Shell 93 advocates are a bit overblown at times (and their advocacy for their cause is too intense for their own good), it seems to me this shell alone might make a usable /bin/sh replacement. > P.S. - It seems that Linux distros are coming around full circle to > the way Unix/Solaris pioneered. No longer does bash==/bin/sh Yup. And you'll notice that I didn't propose using Bash in this situation. Brian, if you have some areas in the system that you believe will be impacted negatively performance-wise, I'd love to help you get some data so we can do the evaluation. dsc _______________________________________________ pkg-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-discuss
