[TUHS] A few comments on porting the Bourne shell

[Luther Johnson]

Point taken, if not entirely understood :)

On 01/02/2023 11:00 AM, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> 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