[CentOS] Real sh? Or other efficient shell for non-interactive scripts

[Joerg Schilling]

Warren Young <wyml at etr-usa.com> wrote:

> > The schily tools act as a container to publish the current code state. There is 
> > no such maintained web page.
>
> I was referring to the summary on the SourceForge page, where you just list the contents of the package without explaining why one would want to download it.

I thought I don't need to make advertizing for well known software.

I manage the only actively maintained portable Bourne Shell and I do so
as well for SCCS.


> > I would be interested to understand why Heirloom seems to so well known and my 
> > portability attempts seem to be widely unknown.
>
> I can think of several explanations:
>
> 1. The Heirloom pages explain what features each download provides, rather than just give a list of program names.

The problem is that the developes page cannot contain much information and in 
general, I prefer to code than to write advertizing.


> If you tell me that I can download ?bsh?, I have no idea why I want bsh based solely on its name.  If you tell me that I can download ?od?, I reply that I already have a functioning version of od, thank you very much. :)

Bsh is mainly in schily tools to show people how the first shell with an 
interactive editable history did look like. Bsh != Bourne Shell.
It was named bsh because I implemented my history editor at H. Berthold AG
while working on a depanded page variant of UNOS.

> 2. Many of those who might be interested in your osh are already well served by the Ancient Unix V7 + SIMH combination:
>
>   http://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/various/ancient/
>
> You are left with the subset of people who want to run something other than the shells that come with their OS, and who want it to run natively.
>
> I should point out that a lot of people using the Ancient Unix images actually don?t want old bugs fixed.
>
> 3. It?s not clear from the files I?ve peeked into in your source distribution when bsh first became available in an OSI-approved form, but it seems to be sometime in the 2005-2007 range.
>
> If that is true, then bsh is several years late to fill a gap already filled by ash, in the same way that the prior existence of bash makes the open-source version of ksh93 uninteresting to most people.
>
> This is why you need a web page to sell your project: to explain why someone should abandon bash, zsh, ash, dash, posh, ksh93u+, mksh?

I am not interested in working against ksh93, as this is much closer to POSIX 
than the current Bourne Shell. The Bourne Shell however is a nice idea for the 
system shell in /bin/sh because it is faster than bash and as fast as ksh93 but 
much smaller (if you use the UNIX linker, you can implement lazy linking that 
causes it to be only 80 kB when interpreting scripts). See:

	http://schillix.sourceforge.net/man/man1/ld.1.html

for the UNIX linker man page, -zlazyload


> 4. CDDL annoys a lot of people.  Yes, I know, GPL annoys a lot of people, too.  But again, you?re going up against ash, which is BSD, which annoys almost no one. :)

The CDDL does not annoy people, this is just a fairy tale from some OSS enemies.
BTW: I am of course not against ash, I just support the Bourne Shell.

Jörg

-- 
 EMail:joerg at schily.net                    (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
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