Re: Tasks

[Christoph Egger <Christoph_Egger%gmx.de@localhost>]

Andrew Doran wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 11:13:10AM +0100, Christoph Egger wrote:
> 
>> Alan Barrett wrote:
>>> Yes, ksh has it.  I was talking about sh.
>>>
>>> Anyway, I suppose this is an answer to my question on the wiki about
>>> "why ksh instead of sh".
>> Can we make ksh the default shell on the install cd, please?
> 
> sh on the i386 install CD is the full deal (!SMALL) so we can enable emacs
> mode and tab completion. Is there much payback for making ksh the default
> there? I'm not against it but I don't see the motiviation.

What hits me most with sh on install cd, is that line editing doesn't
work out-of-the box.

When you type 'dmesh' and try to correct it, you end up with
sh: dmesh^Hg: not found

> [Note you could change root's default from csh to sh, but it's likely that
> csh users would lauch a jihad against you because if they install by _hand_
> they now have one more thing to change (stupid but likely).]

I recently booted an old install-cd from 4.99.33 and installed
5.99.7 from nfs on a new disk. Untarring the sets went well,
but then sysinst used the binaries from the sets rather its own
for the configuration stuff like timezone, setting root password, etc.
The binaries crashed. The first boot from disk actually booted
5.99.7 (into single-user) and I had to do it all the configuration
myself then.


>> <offtopic>
>> OpenBSD removed sh from its tree a long time ago.
>> Their /bin/sh is nothing else than
>> "ln /bin/ksh /bin/sh"
>> </offtopic>
> 
> It's like this on AIX too. I don't think we should do it because it will
> break existing scripts and we have people actively maintaining sh.

Solaris has sh for the same reason and unlike us they don't fix their sh
for the same reason. They moved to bash as default shell instead.

> As for offtopic:
> 
> An idea that occurred to me was to have the i386 install CD go "multiuser"
> and create VTs. We could use autologin to start sysinst on the first VT and
> start a couple of shells on the other VTs. Also the i386 install method
> needs to be replicated to amd64. I don't have time do either of these right
> now unfortunatley.

That brings us very close to shipping a Live-CD as default install
media for x86 at least :)

Christoph