[TUHS] A few comments on porting the Bourne shell

[Luther Johnson]

Arnold Schoenberg said of his 12-tone method of music composition, "in 
constraints I find freedom". The best thing about committing to a simple 
style and a small set of tools that span the problem space, is the 
effect it has on my program composition, imho.

On 01/02/2023 10:43 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 02, 2023 at 10:32:50AM -0700, Adam Thornton wrote:
>> But of course the "after it had had a few years to settle" is doing
>> a lot of lifting there.  During the Unix Wars, yeah, clearly using
>> v7 sh as lowest-common-denominator was the right choice.  After the
>> establishment of Linux Hegemony sometime in the early 2000s, I think I
>> remember that you could pretty much count on everyone at least providing
>> a POSIX shell, even if it wasn't the default.  (But of course by then,
>> "everyone" that wasn't Linux or OS X was already down to more-or-less Sun,
>> IBM, HP, and DEC/Compaq.)
> I was supporting a commercial product in the early 2000's and there
> were all sorts of systems then that had old shells.  Yes, you could make
> everything a 2 level thing where the first level finds the correct shell,
> but that's just fuss.  Just make things portable, it's not that hard
> and it works everywhere.
>
> When you get to the commercial world, you'd be stunned to see how long
> old machines last.  If they are solving some problem, and they aren't
> broken, nobody replaces them.  I'll bet you anything there are still
> SCO registers out there, I'll bet there are still PDP-11s out there.
>
> If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
>