Re: mksh import

[Matthew Mondor <mm_lists%pulsar-zone.net@localhost>]

On Thu, 30 Dec 2010 15:39:00 +0100
tlaronde%polynum.com@localhost wrote:

> I'm not a NetBSD developer but an user, so this is for what is worth,
> but could someone explain me why something more than a strictly
> compliant POSIX shell should be in base?

> Even a Bourne shell, POSIX compliant but with sugar not only for
> interactive use, is IMHO a bad system shell since it will not give
> a "POSIX.2 validator" for scripts supposed to run on different Unix
> flavors. I hate seing that a pkgsrc package forces the installation
> of bash, perl and so on simply because the programmers or
> developers don't know that 99.99% of their needs for this kind of
> pkg stuff are covered by POSIX utilities, and that the remaining is
> probably, is this very case, dispensable.

Seconded.

POSIX compliance issues put aside, personally I'm now allright using
ash AKA /bin/sh as both interactive and scripting shell.  I used ksh
for interactive shell (although still /bin/sh for scripting) in the
past, until I got sick of the ksh line editor (long lines causing
scrolling instead of wrapping), and once I noticed that ash grew the
minimal interactive features I needed (albeit admitedly filename
completion is slightly buggy if dealing with special characters, and
the line editor (libedit) cannot currently accept non-ASCII printable
input like UTF-8 characters).

But I have no opinion about replacing /bin/ksh with mksh.  Although,
can mksh also use libedit?  At least then as libedit improves its
interactive editor also would, with better integration.

Thanks,
-- 
Matt