Re: Why would I use .namespace.myvar?

[Stephane Chazelas <stephane@chazelas.org>]

2024-03-10 19:53:05 -0400, Mark J. Reed:
> On Sun, Mar 10, 2024, at 6:16 PM, Ray Andrews wrote:
> 
> >  BTW interesting to learn that ksh is still in active development, I
> > thought it was on
> >  ice, like bash.
> 
> 
> Around twenty years ago, AT&T moved ownership of ksh to their open source
> arm, the AT&T Software Technology group (AST), which maintained it as an
> open project on GitHub.

Quite a few approximations in there (some and omissions at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KornShell as well actually).

Github didn't exist 20 years ago.

ksh93's code was released as OpenSource around 2000. The code
could be downloaded from AT&T research
(http://www.research.att.com/sw/download/). See
https://web.archive.org/web/20001205164600/http://kornshell.com/

AFAICT, the move to github (and to using git for revision
control)  didn't happen until 2016.

> As with prior releases, the year of the major
> release (and corresponding edition of the book) was kept as the "major
> revision" number

Though contrary to ksh85, ksh86, ksh88 before it, ksh93 was a
rewrite from scratch and significantly incompatible.

> while subsequent releases incremented an alphabetic
> suffix. The last AST release was 93u, released in December 2012 - the 23rd
> release of the 1993 version of ksh.

https://github.com/att/ast/blob/2016-01-10-beta/src/cmd/ksh93/RELEASE
or
https://github.com/ksh93/ksh93-history/blob/master/src/cmd/ksh93/RELEASE

Ksh93u was released on 2011-02-08, and stable development carried
on with two(!) "releases" tagged ksh93u+, and one ksh93v- beta
release with a bunch of new, unstable and more experimental than
ever features.

As there's been some k+, n+... releases, ksh93u is rather the
29th (ksh93a being the second).

> After that the codebase was dormant
> for a while.  Then in 2019 a developer got excited about reviving the
> project and updating it.

If you're referring to Kurtis Rader, he was active starting
around early 2018.

> They started with the in-progress incomplete 93v
> release, which they called "93v-"

It was already called v-, v hadn't been released.

> but the result was dubbed "ksh 2020".
> 2020 had some bug fixes and improvements, but the code changes were
> substantial, performance suffered, there was a lot of drama on the project.
> I saw accusations that the new developer was hacking and slashing the
> codebase without taking the time to understand it or listen to those who
> did. I wasn't paying enough attention to know how valid the criticism was,
> but the drama seems to have been enough to torpedo the project. However, if
> you run "brew install ksh93" on macOS, 2020.0 is what you get to this day.
> 
> Then some of the 2020 contributors decided to start over from the AT&T
> source code, backporting the bug fixes from ksh2020 onto the
> last-known-stable 93u, and building up from there. Their approach is to
> tread carefully and not do anything drastic.  That effort has given us the
> ksh93u+X/1.x.y versions, most recently ksh93u+m/1.0.8 at the end of last
> year; 1.1.0 is expected soon.

No, AFAIK, the m is for Martijn Dekker aka McDutchie, who's at the
initiative and main contributor of that new main stable
development. He's or at least used to be a contributor to these
zsh mailing lists as well, and might be able to give more
insight if he's still around here.

> The GNU folks haven't been idle, though. The latest official bash release
> is 5.2, from 2022, but the patchlevel is up to 5.2.26, and there have been
> commits as recently as this week on the devel branch.
> 
> There are still at least bugfixes going into ash and dash (and busybox,
> whose sh is based on ash), too. So yeah, Zsh is far from the only
> Bourne-family shell still seeing active development.
[...]

Not to mention yash, mksh (MirBSD and Android shell) and the sh
of other BSDs (based on pdksh like on MirBSD or OpenBSD or ash
like on NetBSD or FreeBSD). yash despite being much younger
could almost be considered to have overtaken bash in terms of
feature level.

-- 
Stephane