On Tue, May 03, 2005 at 02:57:18 +0200, Zbigniew Baniewski wrote:

> In my opinion, all the shells shipped "by default" are in very old
> (and even obsolete) versions - and only the "additional ones" (tcsh,
> bash, ksh) are useful.

Define "useful".  Do you mean for interactive use?  If yes - then you
will never be able to reach consensus which "modern" shells to include
into base.

/bin/sh is enough for all system scripting.  I'm not sure how fully
conformant to POSIX it is currently, but it should be very close.

As for the interactive use, I'm a bash user since 1.12, iirc, however
I find that *uncustomized* base ksh is ok for interactive use on a
bare bones, just installed system.  csh in base apparently provides
enough of interactive csh to csh fans to get their interactive work
done on a just installed system (but I haven't used csh since 80s, so
please correct me if I'm wrong).

So we have a "standard" shell that we use for all system scripts
(check).  And we provide two small interactive shells (ksh for sh
fans, and csh for, uhm, csh fans) that should be sufficient for
initial interactive use (check).  [May be we can, conceivably, even
drop ksh if we can pull some of the interactive sugar into sh].


> But OK, it doesn't make any real problem to me to install the better
> ones additionally; it's just my personal opinion, that the "default
> ones" have very limited functionality, and are really uncomfortable.

See, "uncomfortable"... :).  And we wander into the realm of personal
preferences, habits, etc.  Which bash do we want in base, bash2, or
bash3?  Which version of zsh?  What about plan9 and rc funs?  When do
we want to upgrade to a new *sh version?  What if the new version is
out when our own release is going through RC stage?

pkgsrc better serves the needs of our user base in this area, really.


SY, Uwe
-- 
uwe@ptc.spbu.ru                         |       Zu Grunde kommen
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