On 10/31/06, Joerg Schilling <Joerg.Schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de> wrote: > "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>).
I have to disagree. The sorry state of the shells is the reason why we're close to drop Solaris support from our products. It is NOT LONGER ACCEPTABLE that Sun ships a reduced version of /bin/ksh, driving porting, development and maintenance costs of our products beyond an acceptable point. Maintaining a Solaris port is more resource intensive than ANY other operating system, even in comparison to MacOS 10. Sun now has to decide whether they are willing to support the development of new software on their operating system or maintain backwards compatibility to their obsolete shells at all costs, even at the expense of the software companies who want to port, develop or maintain their software products on Solaris. Irek
