From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 19412 invoked from network); 25 Oct 2001 19:01:04 -0000 Received: from ns2.primenet.com.au (HELO primenet.com.au) (?cOKIWqdIC7FUU/GV5EwsNz72gd+Ly3dC?@203.24.36.3) by ns1.primenet.com.au with SMTP; 25 Oct 2001 19:01:04 -0000 Received: (qmail 1277 invoked from network); 25 Oct 2001 19:01:02 -0000 Received: from sunsite.dk (130.225.247.90) by proxy.melb.primenet.com.au with SMTP; 25 Oct 2001 19:01:02 -0000 Received: (qmail 24346 invoked by alias); 25 Oct 2001 19:00:53 -0000 Mailing-List: contact zsh-workers-help@sunsite.dk; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk X-No-Archive: yes X-Seq: 16164 Received: (qmail 24323 invoked from network); 25 Oct 2001 19:00:52 -0000 X-VirusChecked: Checked Sender: kiddleo@cav.logica.co.uk Message-ID: <3BD86145.DFC54050@yahoo.co.uk> Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2001 20:00:21 +0100 From: Oliver Kiddle X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.77 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.15 i686) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Jos Backus CC: zsh-workers@sunsite.dk Subject: Re: Mac OS X /bin/sh was zsh, to be replaced with bash References: <20011025101943.A92401@lizzy.bugworks.com> <3BD85563.C6A6CFFE@yahoo.co.uk> <20011025111942.C92401@lizzy.bugworks.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Jos Backus wrote: > > On Thu, Oct 25, 2001 at 07:09:39PM +0100, Oliver Kiddle wrote: > > If you manage to make contact with apple, please keep us informed. > > You make some good points there. If you're giving points to folk at Apple then I can suggest plenty more, including: The loadable modules in zsh 4.x make zsh much smaller and more efficient as a non-interactive shell which is the typical use of /bin/sh. With the future POSIX standard we have been discussing with David Korn (ksh author) and Chet Ramey (bash author), zsh will likely be a long way ahead of bash. Not that anything is going to happen with that anytime soon. bash's GPL licence would leave Apple with less flexibility. They might for example want to write a shell module for GUI interaction. With bash, it'd have to be contributed back as GPL code. With zsh, it could be APSL, closed source, zsh licence or any other licence. I might discourage the closed approach but from Apple's perspective they'd be keeping their options open. The explicit emulate command in zsh actually allows zsh to go much further than bash in emulating POSIX. Extra reserved words can be disabled etc. The only way that bash is more compatible is that it adds fewer additional features. The only argument in favour of bash is that more people are familiar with it from Linux but then bash is largely a subset of zsh anyway. And, I expect that ksh93 would require them to pay a lot of money to AT&T. > I just sent an e-mail to Jordan, I'll let you know when I hear from him. Thanks. If we don't hear anything we should try other channels. It would be a pity if they adopted bash. I've been very impressed with much of what Apple has done with Mac OS X. Two years ago, if someone had suggested I buy a Mac, I'd have made facetious remarks about one button mice. Today I'd be extremely tempted. Oliver _____________________________________________________________________ This message has been checked for all known viruses by the MessageLabs Virus Scanning Service. For further information visit http://www.messagelabs.com/stats.asp