Followup on The Great Shell Debate
In my original blog on the great shell debate I talked about the passionate opinions of
OpenSolaris users on what should be the default shell in OpenSolaris. While I'm not going to stir those hot ashes, I was extremely pleased to see that ksh93 integration into OpenSolaris has
now been completed. (Note, if you are interested in seeing all the latest changes in OpenSolaris, check out the
flag pages.)
Shell aficionados aside, the integration of ksh93 into OpenSolaris marks a major milestone. In the two year history of OpenSolaris. There have been hundreds of bug fixes and other minor code changes contributed by the community to OpenSolaris, but the ksh93 integration marks the first major community project to be integrated back into OpenSolaris. In the next week or so, ksh93 lovers should be able to download Solaris Express Community Edition build 72, our bi-weekly build based on OpenSolaris, and try out ksh93 in Solaris for yourself.
Enjoy!
The whole debate about the default shell has left me shaking my head. You love ksh; fine. I prefer tcsh but that's just me.
The point is that it does not matter what the default shell is, as long as it is easy to change....
Posted by Volker A. Brandt on August 22, 2007 at 01:25 AM PDT #
Actually, I don't use ksh or tcsh, but you are right, that isn't what matters. To me, what matters most is that the community can have the discussion, can port new shells to OpenSolaris if they want to, and can put that work back into the OS, based on what the community wants, not based on any desire or work on the part of a commercial company. To me, that is what matters. And yes, the shell should be easy to change too.
Posted by Marc Hamilton on August 22, 2007 at 07:07 AM PDT #
Volker: Erm, the debate was AFAIK about the status of/sbin/sh (sometimes called /bin/sh which is a softlink to /sbin/sh), _not_ "root"'s default shell (which is AFAIK since ~~Solaris 10 "flexible", e.g. you may use "usermod" or edit /etc/passwd and put any shell there (and if the file is missing /sbin/sh is used as a fall-back option)).
The trouble is that many scripts, applications (through functions like |popen()|, |system()| etc.) and things like Makfiles expect that the shell at /bin/sh supports at least all features specified by the POSIX shell standard and the old Bourne shell (which currently sits at /sbin/sh) don't support a lot of these features (see http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/indiana-discuss/2007-August/002079.html for additional comments) which blows-up a lot of the opensource scripts.
Posted by Roland Mainz on August 22, 2007 at 01:42 PM PDT #
That's great news. By the way, I'll voice my vote for bash. I have no opinion as to whether it's the best shell, but it's the default shell 'of the masses' (Mac OSX, most Linux, FreeBSD).
Posted by Greg Whitescarver on August 23, 2007 at 12:00 PM PDT #
I'll voice my vote for ksh93 because OpenSolaris has a team working on it and an author who is willing to help. For as long as I can remember the bash authors had nothing but scorn for Solaris. ksh93 got Rbac support, bash rejected the same patches. ksh93 got performance optimisations for Solaris, bash rejected such changes. There is a long list of problems with bash vs Solaris - would you really want bash as default system shell if the authors act like that?
Posted by Wendy Lin on August 25, 2007 at 06:30 AM PDT #