Re: [gentoo-dev] POSIX shell and "portable"

[Roy Marples]

While I still have access to the u@g.o email, I'll respond here.


On Mon, 2007-11-05 at 10:22 +0100, Michael Haubenwallner wrote:
> On Sat, 2007-11-03 at 00:47 +0000, Roy Marples wrote:
>
> As it seems too few people really accept your suggestion, I feel it's
> time for me to chime in too, although I don't know what exactly POSIX-sh
> standard defines.

> Agreed, but (speaking for alt/prefix):
>
> Alt/prefix is designed to (mainly) work without superuser access on the
> target machine, which may also be Solaris, AIX, HP-UX and the like.
> /bin/sh on such a machine is not POSIX-shell, but old bourne-shell
> (unfortunately with bugs often).
> And it is _impossible_ to have sysadmins to get /bin/sh a POSIX-Shell
> nor to have that bugs fixed.
>
> But yes, on most machines there is /bin/ksh, which IMHO is POSIX
> compliant (maybe also with non-fixable bugs).
>
> Although I do not know yet for which _installed_ scripts it'd be really
> useful to have them non-bash in alt/prefix, I appreciate the discussion.
>
> To see benefits for alt/prefix too, it _might_ require that discussion
> going from requiring /bin/sh being POSIX-sh towards being
> bourne-shell...

Actually you missed the mark completely.
Nothing in the tree itself specifies what shell to use - instead it's
the package manager. So the PM on Gentoo/Linux/FreeBSD *could*
be /bin/sh and on the systems where /bin/sh is not possible to change to
a POSIX compliant shell then it can still use /bin/bash or wherever it's
installed.

This also applies to the userland tools. If the ebuild or eclass *has*
to use the GNU variants then it should either adjust $PATH so that it
finds them first, or it prefixes them all with g, like it does on
Gentoo/FreeBSD.

None of this is technically challenging in itself, it's just that the
key people who would have to do the work to make this possible have
already given a flat out no.

> > > It seems to me that you actually mean "more FreeBSD-able" or something,
> > > which is a high price to pay for a relatively small part of Gentoo as a
> > > whole.
> >
> > More embeddable.
> > More BSDable.
> > More Linuxable - bash isn't the only linux shell, there are plently of
> > others.
>
> More (generic) unix-able.

Exactly so :)

Thanks

Roy

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