Roland Mainz writes: > Casper.Dik at Sun.COM wrote: > > William Pursell (I think) wrote: > > >I want to add ksh93 and make /bin/sh a link to it. Should save some > > >disk space, memory and make miniroot faster > > > > ksh93 is a *lot* bigger than /bin/sh. > > ... but bigger doesn't always mean "slower" (see my other email in this > thread) ...
Right. Note that the original poster was asserting that it would save disk space. It's highly unlikely to save on disk space given that the binaries used are much bigger. :-/ > > Also, I seriously doubt that you would notice any speed difference on > > install. > > Right (on the other side other things (like better i18n support, math > and the abilty to replace awk/sed/etc. with shell builtin constructs) > and more compact scripts may be advantages (which can be even further > reduced in size using "shcomp") ... but I'm not sure whether this > applies to the miniroot situation where the main limit is available disk > space (erm... or not ? I never looked at how the miniroot stuff really > works... ;-( )) ... The main limit for time is most likely I/O -- and that means making hsfs more efficient (or replacing it) is probably the best road if you care about making install run faster. For low-CPU-horsepower systems, the use of bunzip2 is probably also a high-visibility item. Replacing awk/sed with ksh93 constructs sounds like a _MUCH_ more difficult task. Not only do you have to rewrite the install system itself to do so, you also have to rewrite all the packages that rely on plain old Bourne shell for class-action and pre/post-install scripts. It's a big effort. Worse still, you'd end up creating an upgrade barrier, at least in the Solaris Express distribution, making it very hard or just impossible for some users to upgrade to the new system. Unless there were solid numbers showing amazing performance gains from a total ksh93 conversion, I doubt the resulting chaos would be worth it. That's not to say that some might not want to convert over to ksh93 for scripting, perhaps even for install-related tasks. Some may. I just don't think it's a panacea. -- James Carlson, Solaris Networking <james.d.carlson at sun.com> Sun Microsystems / 1 Network Drive 71.232W Vox +1 781 442 2084 MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757 42.496N Fax +1 781 442 1677
