At 9:38 +0200 18/10/01, Rick Kelly wrote:

>And why would we want to remove (pd)ksh from NetBSD? David Korn has said
>that pdksh is closer to real ksh than any of the other clones out there,

The keywords are "closer" vs "real", I think. ;-)

>Also, the current freely-useable ksh is much bigger than pdksh as it also
>includes wksh and a bunch of other stuff including a few more shared
>libraries.

Yes, but still smaller than bash, right?

As to why remove (and *not* replace by ksh93!):
1. Nothing in the standard install of NetBSD depends on ksh, AFAIK. An
argument could be made that something upon which nothing else depends
should be optional, and not installed by default.
2. Removing it would leave the choice entirely up to the user.

As to why not remove:
A. Most unixes have a ksh (typically ksh88) by default.
B. pdksh is small and easily replaced by ksh93 if one does so desire, as
one would have to in other unixes.
C. Third party stuff might expect the presence of a ksh due to (A).

My point really isn't that pdksh or anything else should or should not be
removed or added to the base installation. Rather, I believe -- like I said
before -- that in general things should be decoupled as much as possible
and bloat should be avoided. Hence I definitely believe Perl should not be
a default thing. I seem to remember when I upgraded a server from IRIX 6.4
to 6.5 -- suddenly there was a /usr/bin/perl (of course an older version!)
in the standard installation, upon which a couple of other modules
depended. I just find such things annoying.

In the end it's a matter of taste, but still "NetBSD" should decide what
"it" likes. As I see things, one of the distinguishing traits of NetBSD is
that it is kept small/clean, and does not try to force a lot of stuff upon
the users. FreeBSD has (IMO) a tendency in that direction, whatever/Linux
is worse, and anything from MS is absolutely worst. That's why *I* love
NetBSD.

-Lasse