[TUHS] Re: A few comments on porting the Bourne shell

[Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>]

On Mon, Jan 02, 2023 at 10:55:51AM -0700, Adam Thornton wrote:
> And no one is saying you can't keep running your SCO cash registers
> forever on your own recognizance, but when they break, you get to keep
> both pieces, and if they break in such a way that suddenly your entire
> operation is being held hostage by some Russian organized crime cartel,
> well, you should have priced that risk appropriately.

Not my problem, I'm not running SCO cash registers, but the customer
might be.  If they have enough money to interest me, then my problem is
having a product that works on their platform.

You argue with me all you want, you aren't going to win.  Writing stuff
in a portable way is not that hard and once you have that figured out,
you just do it.  It's the path to more revenue.

And I've fought this battle with some extremely intelligent and well
meaning engineers, absolutely in the top 1% of software engineers,
and they all caved.  Sometimes it took me letting them off the leash
long enough to make something break, but they all caved eventually.

It's just more pleasant knowing that your stuff will work no matter
what /bin/sh is there.  All the bash-ism in the world are less 
valuable than "it just works".  Don't get me wrong, I use bash-ism
for my personal use but I wouldn't let them get anywhere near a
product I needed to ship.

All that said, I'm done with this topic, feel free to have the last
word, I think I'm boring the smart people at this point.