[TUHS] A few comments on porting the Bourne shell

[G. Branden Robinson]

At 2023-01-02T10:48:32-0700, Luther Johnson wrote:
> 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.

Schoenberg didn't have to compose for orchestras such that the Berlin
Philharmonic string section tuned half of the octave meantone with the
other half equal-tempered, whereas the Royal Concertgebouw had the
brasses play an un-notated ascending major third gliss anytime you
approached the tonic from a tritone _below_ (only).

> On 01/02/2023 10:43 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> > 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.

The logical consequence of this is to write in Autoconf's recommended
dialect of shell, which has far too many rules to remember because every
Unix vendor added exciting new bugs to their "pure" V7 shells.

https://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/autoconf-2.60/html_node/Portable-Shell.html

> > If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

They were all broken.  Badly.  If your scripts worked, you got lucky at
Russian Roulette.  No greater claim to robustness can be made.

POSIX shell conformance still proves challenging for vendors, but is an
immense improvement over the status quo ante.

I agree with Robert Elz though that standardizing the alias feature was
nuts.  I want to know who brought the crack cocaine to the conference
table that day.

Regards,
Branden
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