Re: Weirdness in /bin/sh of 8.0

[maya%netbsd.org@localhost]

You're complaining loudly at someone for changing code you believe is
sacred.

- We don't want to have any code in netbsd that is too sacred to touch.
- kre is ridiculously fucking nice.
- we really, really like kre.

It's like everyone has a score. You can do negative and positive things.
Positive:
[ ] Not break other people's usage in a long of time
[ ] Not breaking the build either
[ ] Friendly in communications
[ ] Fixing reported bugs
[ ] Discuss criticism honestly

Negative:
[ ] Hostile to others changes without a founded reason
[ ] Hostile in communications

kre has been doing a lot of the positive things and none of the negative
things. You're doing the negative things.
I would be defending him even if the criticism was about sh making my
own system unbootable. And it isn't.

> Laudable on his part.  But none are problems in sh.  Period.

It's a problem in dash, which is supposed to be a fork of NetBSD sh.
There's a high chance that the bug existed in older NetBSD sh.

As far as risk goes, sh is maybe medium risk at most.
For comparison, take msaitoh's recent work. He wanted to make newer
ethernet cards work. This was slightly delayed because his changes
damaged his own hardware, which needed to be reflashed by the
manufacturer.

Yes, sh is not statically linked. By the way, neither is init.
- Currently netbsd has some limitations regarding i18n in statically
  linked binaries
- /rescue/sh is statically linked if you must have it

Yes, netbsd could have a package-management method of managing base, but
instead it makes extremely strong guarantees about backwards
compatibility.

The versioning of netbsd is as follows:
kernel version >= library version >= userland/packages.

There were some cases it was violated, but in general, you can run
binaries from very old netbsd with no modification to either libc or
kernel.

We don't control libstdc++ as much but we try to major bump so old
binaries will link against old libstdc++ when we have to change it.