On Tue, Feb 6, 2018 at 8:45 AM, Rob Landley <r...@landley.net> wrote: > On 02/05/2018 09:41 PM, Robert Thompson wrote: >> Yeah, I ran into some similar issues years ago... In my case, I got >> burned into learning not to assume that bash (or any other shell) is >> correct, or even necessarily *self* consistent(even on linux), so I >> tend to reflexively do differential checks. It's a very small amount >> of effort in the normal case, but months of project time and a major >> missed deadline tend to leave a bit of a scar :) >> >> there was a "posix, we swear" vendor /bin/sh, a classic /bin/bash, a >> "new and sexy" /bin/bash, and the same version/same configuration >> /bin/bash running on a different hardware/os... >> >> We wasted months assuming that the newer bash was most likely correct >> (it was a heisenbug, both rare and inconsistent). In that case, turned >> out that the posix sh was technically correct and consistent, and >> *all* of the bashes exhibited *different* incompatible heisenbugs. And >> they tended to show up only about a day into a massive >> un-checkpointable processing run... > > The FSF is bad at writing software, yes. :) > > Part of my formative experience with Linux is that the FSF's software > development efforts basically died for five years (1999-2004), so > distros were using fixed stable versions of the userspace stuff. It was > all basically "done". There were some ubiquitous local vendor patches > (adding -j to tar and such in the 5 year gap between 1.13 and 1.14 being > released, for example), and things that DID need to change like compiler > development forked off as other projects (egcs, libc5), but there was a > de-facto set of tools everybody agreed on, and that mostly included > specific _versions_, and nobody had to care what the FSF thought about > anything. > > Then the FSF noticed its ftp server had been broken into and was > distributing malware, and they took all the source tarballs down and > replaced them with a note asking if anybody had backup copies (of course > the FSF itself didn't: it's the FSF). I noticed this had happened > because I was doing Linux From Scratch, and three weeks later nobody'd > cared enough to do anything about it so I poked slashdot > (https://developers.slashdot.org/story/03/08/13/1530239/fsf-ftp-site-cracked-looking-for-md5-sums) > and that whole debacle seems to have gotten people to notice the FSF was > dead, but instead of _replacing_ them they volunteered at them and tried > to work through their horrible crazy lens, and when that round of > excitement subsided and the FSF went back to dying they tried suing > people to reclaim attention > (https://www.linux.com/news/gpl-requirement-could-have-chilling-effect-derivative-distros) > and that "all we've got to squeeze money out of people is control of the > license" nonsense snowballed into GPLv3. > > Not a net win, really. > > Anyway, even back at busybox I was mostly targeting equivalents of those > 5-year "stable" versions from 1999, and only cherry-picking newer > features when people asked for them or the kernel grew some new thing I > wanted to take advantage of. These days my baseline is posix-2008 plus > any Y2k-era Linux extensions that posix rejected because That's Not > Solaris I Want Solaris La La La Solaris. > > So when I say "a proper bash replacement" I'm _mostly_ targeting bash > 2.x with proper utf8 and the occasional new feature like ~= (regex > matches) that are easy to do. Stuff like <(command) and file{1,2}.txt > are over 20 years old.
<(command) isn't supported in mksh (used by Android) --- i think that's the only thing missing in mksh that anyone's really noticed. > I really don't care what the FSF's done since about 2005. As far as I'm > concerned the Mepis thing I linked above was a career limiting move > _before_ they split "the GPL" into incompatible versions so the Linux > kernel and Samba can't share code even though they implement 2 ends of > the same protocol and are both "GPL". > > (None of this excuses dash, though. :) > > Rob > > P.S. Yes, I did my own GPLv2 enforcement lawsuits circa 2006. That's > another story... > _______________________________________________ > Toybox mailing list > Toybox@lists.landley.net > http://lists.landley.net/listinfo.cgi/toybox-landley.net _______________________________________________ Toybox mailing list Toybox@lists.landley.net http://lists.landley.net/listinfo.cgi/toybox-landley.net