Re: Switch macOS default bootstrap shell

[Jonathan Perkin <jperkin%joyent.com@localhost>]

* On 2020-06-18 at 14:00 BST, Benny Siegert wrote:

> On Thu, 18 Jun 2020, Jonathan Perkin wrote:
> 
> > I propose changing bootstrap to default to pdksh for these releases,
> > as using a shell outside of system paths still works.
> > 
> > I've tested this in a bulk build using --full, the results of which
> > are here:
> 
> I think this is fine, looks good to me.
> 
> Separately, perhaps mksh might be a better choice of shell. It has a more
> modern codebase compared to pdksh, including a bunch of fixes from Coverity,
> and it builds quickly.

This could do with its own topic, but the constraint of the bootstrap
shell is that the sources must be kept unpacked in pkgsrc, so adding
any alternatives to pdksh (the only shell we have unpacked) would need
to be carefully considered before we import, as we don't want to have
to end up maintaining lots and bloating the repository.

Personally I would pick dash.  I already did a bunch of work a few
years back to integrate it, it's very small, fast, and portable, and
the whole point of the bootstrap shell is that it is only used for
scripts, so there's no benefit in having anything that provides any
interactive features.

I suggest if we want to bikeshed this further we move it to its own
thread, and back up any proposals with hard data (patches and test
bulk builds across multiple platforms).  I started to do this with
dash here https://gist.github.com/jperkin/992c375d067c8960541d but as
usual got distracted with other things.

Cheers,

-- 
Jonathan Perkin  -  Joyent, Inc.  -  www.joyent.com