[ksh93-integration-discuss] some questions about ksh93 integration

[Roland Mainz]

April Chin wrote:
> Just to let everyone know, we are proceeding with our plans to integrate
> ksh93 into ON.  Dan will submit his concerns to the ARC but make no
> recommendations.

AFAIK the remaining steps (April may correct me) look like this:
1. get the ARC case paper posted and approved
2. get the changes to the OS/Net codebase reviewed and
requested/neccesary changes implemented

This may take at least a month from now...

[snip]
> I understand people are frustrated by how long it is taking to integrate
> ksh93; I hope they are not taking out that frustration on
> community members (in Sun or external) who are trying to help or
> trying to understand the direction of this project.

Just to explain why this takes this long - even while the initial
putback is just restricted to introduce ksh93 as /usr/bin/ksh93 it is
still very ambitious - we're trying to introduce ksh93, introduce the
matching libraries (libshell, libcmd, libdll and libast) as shared
libraries, add 64bit versions of the shells and use them as default if
the hardware+OS is 64bit capable and do lots of other stuff, including
code cleanup and feature adjustments. This all needs time, for example
figuring out now both 32bit and 64bit executables and includes can live
within one installation is not an easy thing (it was even initially my
impression that this wasn't possible without major code changes+cleanup
in the AT&T codebase because 32bit and 64bit AST includes differ and
only far later in the project we found a solution to generate an
unified+merged version of both includes (created using "/usr/bin/diff
-D")).

Another reminder is that this project is a "pathfinder" - we are the
first who are doing a very large project at OpenSolaris.org (not Sun)
which means we're hitting many obstacles, ranging from technical over
organisational up to legal issues and many of them are tricky (which is
an understatement).
We are playing the "pathfinder" for other things, too - like having a
64bit shell around which gets enabled by an automatic selection process
(this was never tried for a shell yet). Such details simply need time
for development and testing.

Therefore it does NOT help to rant, wail and attack people here - it
just steals more time from April and me which should really be invested
in the project itself...
It would be really nice to cease fire and maybe do some usefull work,
for example testing the binaries (see
http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/ksh93-integration-discuss/2006-August/000817.html)
etc. ... :-)

----

Bye,
Roland

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