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Date:      Sun, 16 Apr 2000 12:30:56 -0600
From:      Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com>
To:        Julian Elischer <julian@elischer.org>
Cc:        "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@zippy.cdrom.com>, freebsd-arch@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Shells
Message-ID:  <38FA06E0.43004E28@softweyr.com>
References:  <31345.955883432@zippy.cdrom.com> <38F9A104.3F54BC7E@elischer.org>

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Julian Elischer wrote:
> 
> Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
> >
> > > Two reasons of the top of my head: GPL'd and gratuitously incompatible.
> >
> > GPL'd things go into /usr/src/gnu - no big deal.  If we were overly
> > squeamish about the GPL then we wouldn't have "grep" or a compiler
> > toolchain either, among other things, and I doubt anybody's arguing
> > for killing those.  The ash shell is just bad enough that I'd consider
> > a change of license for a truly functional shell out-of-the-box to
> > be a more than acceptable trade-off.
> 
> From the perspective of a company using FreeBSD embedded, /bin/sh
> is not an otional component so we would want a non GPL version
> if we could get it. Luckily it isn't linked with anything like
> (say) gdbm but it's yet another GPL pin in the 'minimum system'
> I need for an embedded system. The size of BASH is also a consideration
> when I'm trying to ge everything into a 2MB flash.
> if you do want BASH in the base system, please don't take away ash.

Again, zsh might be a better option here.  The license is good, and the
static binary size is smaller than bash, though larger than ash.  Zsh
sports the ease-of-use interactive features we seem to be clamoring for
in this thread.

I have been a bash user for many years, but would not want to put bash
in an embedded system for fear of contaminating the code base; Julian's
point is well founded.

-- 
            "Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?"

Wes Peters                                                         Softweyr LLC
wes@softweyr.com                                           http://softweyr.com/




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