* On 2006-09-30 at 19:06 BST, Alistair Crooks wrote:

> [..] I've said to Pavel and a number of people, I'm actually of the
> opinion that we should go with ksh, despite the fact that I've never
> used it as a login shell, and will probably never use it either.

I've always thought it strange that we ship ksh.  I can only begin to
imagine the level of flamewar that would commence were we to suggest
importing a "kls" command which was pretty much the same as ls, but
had the ability to add colour to output and some other things while
duplicating 95% of the ls functionality.

Much has been made recently of us falling behind other systems, and
how we can begin to correct that perception.  There are many other
projects out there maintaining various utilities, and it would appear
to make sense that as an overall objective, we look to "do one thing,
and do it well", and give the users the ability to pick and choose
exactly what extras they put on-top.

We're never going to please everybody by choosing X above Y, so maybe
the way to win is to not play - just provide a small, stable, well
documented and well engineered base system upon which each particular
user can customise to their taste.

Our current package tools are good; I think by making them excellent
and more accessible a lot of these types of discussions will
eventually become obsolete.

Taking this argument to a logical conclusion, we'd see that we must
provide /bin/sh by default to support a basic operating system, but
that anything else should probably be provided by extra packages.  Any
work spent keeping ksh/csh updated can instead be put into making our
/bin/sh simply the best one in existance.  Users who want something
more functional for interactive use can easily `pkg_add ${x}sh'

I'm not sure that I'm advocating this completely as I know it's highly
unlikely that it'd be a popular nor likely resolution, but maybe it's
just something to think about in light of NetBSD's current position.

 [ for the record, I set my shell to /bin/sh then exec bash or ksh ]
 [ or nothing depending on what is available on the current system ]

Regards,

-- 
Jonathan Perkin                                     The NetBSD Project
http://www.perkin.org.uk/                       http://www.netbsd.org/