[oi-dev] Desktop Illumos Still Matters

[Joerg Schilling]

Jim Klimov <jimklimov at cos.ru> wrote:

> I've recently redone this on my laptop with no problems, following my
> own logs on wiki and bugtracker; the only substantial blocker was and is
> the "/sbin/sh" being a symlink to "../usr/bin/ksh" or somesuch. System
> fails to boot itself when /usr is separate. Replacing this symlink with
> a hard copy of /usr/bin/bash (as /sbin/sh) does not break the system as
> much as I can see (several machines doing this for several months now)
> and allows to split /usr off into its own compressed dataset.

I thought thet IPS is too dumb to support this.

Linking /sbin/sh to ksh definitely was a mistake and I plan to fix this in 
SchilliX-ON since a longer time. Before I introduce my fix, I will first 
replace the unmaintained Bourne Shell from Sun sources by the current 
maintained one which you can find in:

	ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily/

This Bourne Shell

-	fixes all Bourne Shell bugs that have been documented since the late
	1980 but never fixed by AT&T or Sun.

-	Was converted from using sbrk(2) to malloc(3) to achieve portability
	and allows to use libc routines that depend on malloc().

-	fixes some previouly unknown bugs in string handling that have been a 
	result from removing a dependency on SIGSEV to auto-expand memory for 
	automatic string management as implemented in the original version
	from 1977.

-	Adds the Commandline History editor I developed in 1982 and implemented 
	in 1984 for my "bsh".

-	Adds the advanced alias mechanism from my "bsh" that is better than the
	alias implementation from ksh.

-	Adds a new builtin "dosh" that allows to write intrinsic "shell scripts"
	via aliases.

-	Adds pushd/popd/dirs builtins

-	Adds a mapper for e.g. cursor keys that works reliably in contrast to
	what is known from ksh and bash that sometimes do not map strings and
	thus insert raw key strings.

The combination of editable history, aliases and pushd/popd makes it nice for
interactive work.

I plan to install this shell (that is still _much_ smaller than ksh) as /sbin/sh
and to fix the 6 SMF scripts that have been modified to only work with ksh. 

As a nice hint: The new Bourne Shell compiles and runs on Cygwin (thanks to no 
longer depending on sbrk(2)) and if you use it to interpret autoconf scripts, 
this is 3x faster than bash.

I hope that other OpenSolaris distros will follow SchilliX-ON and SchilliX with 
this enhancement.


Jörg

-- 
 EMail:joerg at schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       js at cs.tu-berlin.de                (uni)  
       joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
 URL:  http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily