On 13 June 2012 18:00, Glenn Fowler <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 13 Jun 2012 16:36:32 +0200 Dan Shelton wrote:
>> On 13 June 2012 15:43, Glenn Fowler <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> > we've stated our case
>> > I'll restate one more time
>> > I guess we have a larger than average (internal not-open-source) user base 
>> > to deal with
>> > a lot of ksh usage within that user base is on critical paths
>> > any disruptions obviously cause delays, but it can also damage ksh's rep
>> > and make it harder for us to convince projects to use our stuff
>> > many times ksh and the standard (1) commands are a foot in the door
>> > to other software that we first peddle internally, and then externally
>
>> OK. I understand your point. But: Did you realize that some of us have
>> carefully formulated proposals to put grep, od, tr and xargs into
>> libcmd but NOT enable them by default, that means a intentional
>> builtin grep, builtin od, bulitin tr or builtin xargs must be issued
>> before ANY damage may occur? This will limit the possible damage down
>> to the explicit users who explicitly ask for this trouble.
>
> dgk had discussed these issues privately before they were proposed
> I can't count how many times a simple change has come back to bite us
> (this includes linking in code that is not even used -- there are many
> large legacy projects that make it very hard to remove code, even if it is
> dead by 100 different ways of looking at it, because of unintended 
> consequences)
> we decided to err on the side of caution
> especially where the integrity of ksh is involved
> with the current solution all control is limited to the .paths file
> when diagnosing problems we can say "remove the .paths file" and
> be reasonably certain that -lcmdtst is out of scope
>
> we also wanted to limit the number and types of ksh versions in the field
> e.g., to avoid
>        "replace ksh YYYY-MM-DD immediately because there is a security bug in 
> xargs"
>
> lets get ksh stability against the great debugging that has been going on in 
> the
> past few months (valgrind, bleeding edge gcc options, bleeding edge non-gcc 
> builds)
> and separately, stability in -lcmdtst
> and then revisit -lcmdtst::foo => -lcmd:foo

OKOK, I got it. One request: Could you please ship cmdtst with
ast-ksh? ast-open doesn't build on some platforms with stock
installations and it is hard to install extra stuff just to get
ast-open to compile

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