[TUHS] Version 256 of systemd boasts '42% less Unix philosophy' The Register

[Steve Nickolas]

On Sun, 16 Jun 2024, Greg A. Woods wrote:

> At Mon, 17 Jun 2024 18:34:06 -0400 (EDT), Steve Nickolas <usotsuki at buric.co> wrote:
>
> Well, to be pedantic "dash" was a direct descendant of NetBSD's /bin/sh,
> which in turn was the shell from 4.4BSD, which was of course originally
> Kenneth Almquist's Ash.  Quite a few changes were made to the shell in
> BSD between the time it was imported (1991), and the 4.4 release (1995).
>
> Unfortunately Dash now lags very far behind NetBSD's /bin/sh code.
>
> If they had just kept it as a port of the upstream code and continued to
> update it from upstream then "they" would now have a much better shell
> (as much development has occurred in NetBSD since 1997), but no it's a
> full-on fork that's basically ignored its upstream parent since day one.
> It is doomed now to need fixes for the same bugs again, often in
> incompatible ways, and probably inevitably new features will be added to
> it, also in incompatible ways.

It's still possible to port NetBSD's /bin/sh to Debian (I've done it, 
called it "nash", but don't have any official release because I don't 
really see a point).

And it's basically the "sh" I'm currently using in my projects because I 
don't have the talent to write my own. :P

-uso.