On Wed, 7 Mar 2007, Bruno Jargot wrote: > I am still very sceptical because most comments I see from people with > a @sun.com address talk about a Real Bourne Shell or Backward > Compatibility and not about the Reality that all other competitors > have evolved their /bin/sh much further with POSIX as minimum. IMO the > discussion is not balanced, too many people look backwards and ignore > the Reality of software development and evolution. Solaris is the last > of the Unix operating system which is under active development and > ships the Real Bourne Shell as /bin/sh. This worries me and looks like > a bad omen about the future of Opensolaris.
I think we all agree that for interactive use, /bin/sh is, umm, non-optimal. However, one of the great things about SOlaris is it's backwards compatibility, and the fact that one can rely on /bin/sh really being ye olde Bourne Shell, and not some 95% compatible pretender like it is with certain other OSes I could mention. Solaris already ships with numerous shells, including bash, so just your (non-root) account use the shell of your choice. Replacing /bin/sh with something else is, in my non-Sun.com opinion, not advisable, unless 100% compatibility with Bourne Shell is guaranteed. If people's view about the future viablity hinges on what shell /bin/sh is, I humbly submit their view is rather blinkered. I really don't think the following conversation would ever take place: A: Hey, let's use Solaris: it has DTrace, zones, ZFS, and all sorts of other really cool features, including guaranteed backward compatibiity. B: Yeah, but it ships with /bin/sh as the Bourne Shell. A: What, /bin/sh isn't bash?! B: Nope. You have to run /bin/bash to get bash. A: Well forget Solaris then; let's use Linux. That just ain't gonna happen in anywhere that is the slightest bit serious about using Solaris. -- Rich Teer, SCSA, SCNA, SCSECA, OpenSolaris CAB member CEO, My Online Home Inventory Voice: +1 (250) 979-1638 URLs: http://www.rite-group.com/rich http://www.myonlinehomeinventory.com _______________________________________________ opensolaris-code mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/opensolaris-code
