[indiana-discuss] Moving forward with a replacement for /sbin/sh ... / was: Re: [caiman-discuss] Need your input on safemodeboot archive in Indiana

[Roland Mainz]

David.Comay at Sun.COM wrote:
[snip]
> I know that Roland has some ideas on moving forward in this area and
> though I haven't had the time to review these ideas personally, perhaps
> working with him would be a good start.

Erm... technically most (or better: _all_ of the work which I can do
alone has been done (see below for the remaning bits)) of the work has
already been done and the upcoming ksh93-integration update will
integrate further changes+fixes based on the feedback we got in the last
half year...
... AFAIK the only remaning "blocker" ToDo item (before large-scale
testing/deployment as /sbin/sh ([1]) in a distribution like Indiana)
would be to create something like /sbin/ksh93 and move the ksh93
libraries (e.g. { libshell, libcmd, libdll, libsum and libast } to the
root filesystem as part of an ARC case. In theory we could do this with
the upcoming ksh93-integration update ARC case but we need _support_ for
a "consumer" for this (the original draft for PSARC/2006/550 proposed
/sbin/ksh93 but this was removed because we lacked such a consumer who
simply said "we need it [=/sbin/ksh93]" ... and we still have this
chicken&&egg problem (e.g. without having /sbin/ksh93 around the
important consumers can't use ksh93 and will therefore use other
solutions (or ignore simply ignore bugs (e.g. see the discussion in
sfwnv-discuss@ with SMF scripts not being able to detach processes)) but
without consumers we can't do the move...) ... ;-( ) - otherwise we're
just stuck in the chicken&&egg situation forever...

[1]=See
http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/indiana-discuss/2007-August/002079.html
, part 3 ('Which shell should replace the "original" Bourne shell as
/sbin/sh ?') - IMO /sbin/sh should be defined to be a "POSIX shell",
e.g. /sbin/sh should be more like an "abstract interface" which
implements the POSIX shell standard (erm... better wording is needed in
this case... ;-/ ). If someone needs any features beyond the feature set
defined in the standard a different interpreter (e.g. /sbin/ksh93)
should be used. This leaves the door open for future (POSIX conformant)
shells (this definition tries to ensure that we don't run into same
"update /sbin/sh"-trouble again in 10 or 20 years).

----

Bye,
Roland

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