Fabian Greffrath dixit: >> If you want, I can bounce them (and respond on) the mksh mailing >> list (also on GMane) for public benefit; then just say so. > >I have no objections, but please don't expect me to subscribe.
Ah, of course not ;-) I myself dislike lists that require subscription a lot, so I don’t require that myself either. But to be able to browse this discussion thread, e.g. at http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.os.miros.mksh/255 or via NNTP (and to respond via NNTP, with correct References and In-Reply-To headers) is a definite benefit. Oh, and archival and search engine visibility of course. Also, if it’s public I need not ask whether more people can be added to Cc every time ;-) We’ll just have to remember to keep you in Cc, but that’s easy ☺ >Some time ago I was also very interested in getting some standard >shell-accompanying Unix utilities to run on Win32. I also found >unxutils.zip and used it for a while, but it felt bad to use software >that is practically unmaintained and bit-rotting for years. The biggest Well that’s not so much a concern if you work with BSD normally ;-) or just need unix-ish tools quickly and don’t use GNU tools all that much/often. >advantage IMHO was that all binaries were statically linked against the >compatibility library (called downhill from 1994!) and thus were >instantly usable once copied onto the harddisk. That’s a big benefit. >Then I tried Cygwin as an alternative which is the exact counterpart. It >is actively developed, features a full-blown POSIX compatibility layer >in the form of a bunch of dynamic libraries. But it also ships a >complete isolated environment clocking in with some GB of harddisk space Yes… it still runs on top of Win32, which is why I personally prefer Interix. >In the end I found MSYS and stick with it until today. It is an early >fork of Cygwin by the people who develop MinGW and provides just enough >of a shell and tools to run ./configure scripts. Right. It’s pretty hard to develop _for_ MSYS really, but stock (Unix) mksh builds against it out-of-the-box thanks to, I think, RT from IRC. (If I mis-remember, sorry.) >I'd suggest to give it a try and maybe bundle it with mksh/Win32 to With MSYS I’d rather bundle (Unix) mksh built against MSYS into their distfiles (it’s mksh which is the stand-alone, separate, portable thing that can be bundled with others, not the other way around). >provide a better and more complete shell environment. I am not sure if It will, yes, but this is half-way orthogonal to mksh/Win32, which fits with people not wanting to install half a Unix environment. (Basically, if you consider “something like Cygwin” you can just build stock Unix mksh for it; this will then use its normal console I/O for example, whereas mksh/Win32 will use the WinAPI functions – but (quick idea of mine, didn’t talk with Michael about it yet) it could use the wide character versions of those APIs and just present it to edit.c appropriately, instead of having to deal with codepages and stuff.) In short, there’s a spectrum of “environments” in which one could use mksh on “some sort of NT”: ^ | native WinAPI | MinGW | | | | | PW32 | | UWIN | MSYS | Cygwin | | SUA (Server 2008 R2) | SFU/Interix 3.5 | | CoLinux | VMware/VirtualPC/etc. | v You can plug it in anywhere there, but it won’t be the same (e.g. I hold the rule “no special handling for drive letters or CR/LF line ends” strict for MSYS mksh but (other than asking to also not handle CR/LF as newline) haven’t yet restricted mksh/Win32 that way). >there are other alternatives (I believe I have once read about a >busybox.exe for W32), but I have tried UnxUtils, Cywin and MSYS and I made it to my personal goal to get rid of ash in all its variants; busybox’ ash is about middle of the bad-worse-worst playing field though. I think mksh fills the place of an sh component pretty well. (And indeed, Android uses it alongside their “toolbox” and mksh can be used as “beastiebox”’ shell component.) But that’s neither here nor there ;-) Thanks for your interest and feedback, //mirabilos -- 18:47⎜<mirabilos:#!/bin/mksh> well channels… you see, I see everything in the same window anyway 18:48⎜<xpt:#!/bin/mksh> i know, you have some kind of telnet with automatic pong 18:48⎜<mirabilos:#!/bin/mksh> haha, yes :D 18:49⎜<mirabilos:#!/bin/mksh> though that's more tinyirc – sirc is more comfy
