oh I see now that you already changed the topic

Pier Paolo Grassi


Il giorno mer 3 mar 2021 alle ore 15:00 Pier Paolo Grassi <
pierpaolog@gmail.com> ha scritto:

> that's quite interesting, for me at least. If you have any good link to
> articles or books about the history of shell programs and the motivations
> behind various choices and want to share I would really appreciate it
> idk if this is interesting to the list also or I should message privately
> about topics not directly related to zsh, or if I should start a new
> thread, I would appreciate some direction on this
>
> Pier Paolo Grassi
>
>
> Il giorno mer 3 mar 2021 alle ore 11:23 Stephane Chazelas <
> stephane@chazelas.org> ha scritto:
>
>> 2021-03-03 08:57:15 +0100, Pier Paolo Grassi:
>> > out of curiosity, how have you assembled this informations? from memory
>> or
>> > digging in the source trees?
>> [...]
>>
>> I do collect a number of old archives of various shell source
>> codes downloaded from here and there and look in there for this
>> kind of information. I enjoy this kind of archeological digging.
>>
>> For recent versions, you can generally look in cvs/svn/git logs,
>> or use git blame/svn ann or git log --grep...
>>
>> For older versions, most shells keep changelogs. zsh has some
>> Etc/ChangeLog*, bash has a NEWS and CWRU/changelog. zsh links
>> its changelog to the mailing list. So not only you can find the
>> change, but also the reasoning and discussions behind it. That's
>> quite unique and invaluable.
>>
>> It's hard to obtain old ksh versions. All I have is ksh86 (from
>> some bsd source tree), svr4.2 ksh88d from archive.org, the
>> leaked solaris11's ksh88i, ksh93d from dtksh, ksh85's man page
>> and some of ksh93's since it's been made opensource. There's a
>> RELEASE file in there (and more for the libraries) but it's a
>> bit patchy.
>>
>> BSD shells (based on ash originally published on usenet in 1989,
>> so easy to find, except for OpenBSD which switched to pdksh) are
>> easy as the sccs history is publicly available.
>>
>> For tcsh, someone compiled all versions back to 6.06.1 in the
>> git repo. Some older versions can be found on usenet.
>>
>> I started using zsh around the time bash 2.0 came out. But that
>> was 25 years ago. I can't say I remember much from then. Back
>> then, bash was already quite limited compared to zsh. It didn't
>> even have arrays.
>>
>> --
>> Stephane
>>
>