18 Jun
2024
18 Jun
'24
7:52 a.m.
On Sun, 16 Jun 2024, Greg A. Woods wrote:
At Mon, 17 Jun 2024 18:34:06 -0400 (EDT), Steve
Nickolas <usotsuki(a)buric.co> wrote:
Well, to be pedantic "dash" was a direct descendant of NetBSD's /bin/sh,
which in turn was the shell from 4.4BSD, which was of course originally
Kenneth Almquist's Ash. Quite a few changes were made to the shell in
BSD between the time it was imported (1991), and the 4.4 release (1995).
Unfortunately Dash now lags very far behind NetBSD's /bin/sh code.
If they had just kept it as a port of the upstream code and continued to
update it from upstream then "they" would now have a much better shell
(as much development has occurred in NetBSD since 1997), but no it's a
full-on fork that's basically ignored its upstream parent since day one.
It is doomed now to need fixes for the same bugs again, often in
incompatible ways, and probably inevitably new features will be added to
it, also in incompatible ways.
It's still possible to port NetBSD's /bin/sh to Debian (I've done it,
called it "nash", but don't have any official release because I don't
really see a point).
And it's basically the "sh" I'm currently using in my projects because
I
don't have the talent to write my own. :P
-uso.