[TUHS] A few comments on porting the Bourne shell

[Clem Cole]

On Mon, Jan 2, 2023 at 11:51 AM Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

> I think it is less of an issue today but if I were still supporting a multi
> platform product, I'd still insist on it.
>
Yep, and it's so easy to do.  It's just a discipline.  @Adam I helped
create POSIX, so I get it.
But Larry nailed it.  It is just cheaper and easier to be disciplined and
stick with Bourne for your scripts.  *Teach your people the skills and you
save time and money in the long run.*   It's that simple.  As Larry says,
you never know and the problem is - when it happens, it tends to happen on
a short leash.  If you have been disciplined, it's a non-problem.  It's
really not that hard to use the V7 syntax.  Everything you want/need to do
is there.

BTW: At Intel, a couple of years back (less than 3-5 years ago)  we had a
site where we needed things to work on a specific target that was, shall we
say 'a bit custom' - V7 syntax was just fine for the installer - boy folks
were happy a few of us had been on their case to get rid of the bashism the
Millenials had tried to add (I'm not really sure POSIX.2 would have been
good enough -- maybe - but Bourne was fine].

FWIW: In my start-up times, under the same rules of being disciplined, as
VP of Engineering, I insisted, all C and C++ code was required to
'flex-e-lint' warning clean.   I gave my folks a 3-week week slip to clean
everything up.   I was cursed during that time.   But guess what, the
outstanding bug list dropped to ⅒ of what it had been.  Created quite a few
true believers.  And we made those 3 weeks back before we were done.

Clem


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