"Garrett D'Amore" <garrett_damore at tadpole.com> wrote:
> I recently heard that there are plans to use isaexec to wrap ksh93. I
> think this is an incredibly bad idea. Especially given the
> microoptimizations that have been done lately to make ksh93 faster (e.g.
> the MMU page size adjustment.)
>
> The reason for this is that I understand that someday ksh93 will replace
> the default shell. I agree that having a POSIX shell be the default
> will be a good thing for the system, and I look forward to the day with
> ksh93 can fulfill this role.
>
> What concerns me, is that the extra time (2 milliseconds was a rough
> measurement done in one case) it takes to spawn a shell is going to have
> a negative impact on overall system performance if this becomes the
> default shell.
>
> The shell is forked/execed a _lot_. Consider builds of Solaris, where
> "make" spends almost all of its time execing the shell.
I would take this as important argument for keeping the Bourne shell
for /bin/sh.
Instead of replacing /bin/sh and breaking backwards compatibility,
it would help more to find a useful way to define how to directly refer to
the POSIX shell (and this way e.g. allowing to standardize on #!<interpreter>).
J?rg
--
EMail:joerg at schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) J?rg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
js at cs.tu-berlin.de (uni)
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