On Mon, 11 Mar 2002, Andreas K=E4h=E4ri wrote:

> Is someone working on packaging the real Korn Shell (ksh93, [1])
> for NetBSD yet?  Or do we wait until AT&T decides to loosen its
> licensing [2] a bit more first?
>
> Other free Unix-projects (Debian GNU/Linux and OpenBSD) have
> been discussing packaging ksh93 for their respective systems,
> and I believe that Red Hat Linux and FreeBSD already do provide
> ksh93 one way or another (but I might be wrong).  Everybody
> seems to be a bit itchy about the license though.

I don't think their license is an obstacle to making a package. The
gist of the license is 1) "We're not responsible", and 2) "The license
has to stay with any derivative work". Only a heavy-hitter like AT&T
would feel the need to to assert that they can't be sued for bugs in
free software -- for everybody else, that goes without saying. The
license is generally more liberal than the GPL; there's no requirement
to redistribute the source with the derivative work, just the license.

> I've seen some mentionings of ksh93 on tech-userlevel (11/2001)
> and netbsd-users (3/2001), but no real conclusion.
>
> [1] http://www.kornshell.com/
> [2] http://www.research.att.com/sw/license/ast-open.html

The suite builds out-of-the-box easily. I looked at making a package,
but gave up, as

  1) It doesn't look easy to build *just* ksh, and the entire suite
     duplicates a lot of functionality in the base system (and if you
     want the entire suite, you could just follow AT&T's directions to
     build and install it.)

  2) I really didn't like ksh93 -- I like pdksh better. Sorry. :-)

If you just want to try ksh93, you could certainly download the whole
package and follow the directions. I also doubt that anyone would
strongly object to having a NetBSD package for it, if you want to
create one, but you could ask on tech-pkg.

Frederick