[ On Wed, January 6, 1999 at 14:10:12 (-0500), I wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: MAKEDEV is not portable
> 
> Absolutely.  Almost 99% of Unix-based Bourne-compatible shells without
> Korn Shell arithmetic have support for shell functions, though not
> always in a syntactically compatible form.

In case anyone missed the 2+2 logic between my post and Charles', let me
point out that all of those non-NetBSD systems on which one might want
to run the NetBSD "MAKEDEV" script but which don't have shell arithmetic
support in their /bin/sh won't likely have shell functions support
either, but as Charles said, most will have an alternate shell that does
support arithmetic expressions (I'd be surprised to find even one legacy
system that supports NFSv2 but which doesn't have Ksh or some near-POSIX
shell available -- I never ran into one in all the time I was porting
systems software to legacy systems even back in 1993).  The point about
the syntax for defining shell functions is made moot by the fact that
they wouldn't help where they're needed anyway.

<sarcasm>
If anyone's trying to host a diskless NetBSD system on such a legacy
platform then they'd probably be a lot better off installing NetBSD on
the legacy hardware first, and then hosting the diskless box from it!
</sarcasm>

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods@acm.org>      <robohack!woods>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>