[arch-general] Why not mksh provides("ksh")?

Thorsten Töpper atsutane at freethoughts.de
Tue Aug 12 14:26:28 EDT 2014


On Sun, 10 Aug 2014 18:21:16 -0700
"G. Richard Bellamy" <rbellamy at pteradigm.com> wrote:

> Not sure if this is the correct venue for this comment, and apologies
> if it's already been mentioned, but why wouldn't mksh [1] provide ksh?
> 
> This would alleviate some AUR dependency weirdness, specifically with
> the oracle-sqldeveloper [2] package, which currently forces an install
> of ksh [3], even though it'll work just fine with mksh.
> 
> -rb
> 
> [1] https://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/mksh/
> [2] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/oracle-sqldeveloper/
> [3] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ksh/

Hello,

that's because mksh by default does not provide a ksh binary, nor did
it contain a mode to behave exactly like the ksh if called by this
name, the extensions are always active. (It's been some years since I
took the package and took a glance at the init code, maybe I'm wrong
with this, feel free to correct me.)

I think it's wrong to place this extended shell in the place of the
original ksh. My intention is simply to give users the possibility to install the
mksh and the original ksh parallel on the same machine, as they don't
collide on the filesystem. If they want to call the mksh as ksh, people
can still create a plain symlink for the binary.

Also there is only one package that depends on mksh in the repos,
kwalletcli. Sven-Hendrik makes no modifications regarding the shell in
this PKGBUILD so I assume it's fine. As long as I don't make a problem
for another TU or a developer I stay to the current setup of the
package, when I add a ksh symlink to the package stating it also
provides the ksh I take users the chance to install the original ksh
and the mksh. There are users who don't want an extended shell because
they work with the original since a lot of years on different systems.

Best Regards,
Thorsten
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