Importing mksh in base

[Baptiste Daroussin]

On Fri, Jan 25, 2019 at 11:24:26AM -0800, Cy Schubert wrote:
> First time I've tried replying inline on this newer phone. Bear with me as this reply may not look like I intend it to.
> 
> On January 25, 2019 11:07:55 AM PST, Baptiste Daroussin <bapt at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
> >
> >
> >Le 25 janvier 2019 18:12:58 GMT+01:00, Cy Schubert
> ><Cy.Schubert at cschubert.com> a écrit :
> >>On January 25, 2019 8:57:51 AM PST, Baptiste Daroussin
> >><bapt at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
> >>>Hi everyone,
> >>>
> >>>I would like to import mksh in base, https://www.mirbsd.org/mksh.htm
> >>>And make it the default root shell (not necessary in one step)
> >>>
> >>>Why:
> >>>1/ it is tiny 400k (in the packaged version) all other shells fitting
> >>>the
> >>>expectation are bigger
> >>>2/ it's default frontend in interactive mode is very close to what
> >>most
> >>>people
> >>>are used to with bash and shells as default root shell on other BSD
> >>and
> >>>most
> >>>linuxes
> >>>3/ from my narrow window csh as a default root shell is one of the
> >>>major
> >>>complaint (usually the first thing a user get faced to) from new
> >>comers
> >>>and
> >>>also for some long timers who are reinstalling a machine and have not
> >>>yet
> >>>installed/configured a bourne compatible shell
> >>>
> >>>What this proposal is _NOT_ about:
> >>>1/ the removal of tcsh from base
> >>>2/ any kid of denial of the quality and interest or features of csh
> >>>
> >>>What do you think?
> >>>Best regards,
> >>>Bapt
> >>
> >>Why not ksh93 instead? It is the original and authoritative Korn
> >shell.
> >>EPL is compatible with the BSD license. Personally, I've been toying
> >>with the idea of importing ksh93 for a while now.
> >>
> >
> >The reason I chose mksh is because it is heavily maintained and from
> >the testing I have done it was the "nicer" interface
> >
> 
> Ksh93 is also heavily maintained.  Look at their github activity. My ksh93-devel port has been tracking updates (I consider important).

I gave a chance to ksh93-devel, my first impression are the following, as an
interactive shell, it looks nicer than I remembered (still prefer mksh though)
the completion looks "unexpected" but interesting I bet that can probably be
tuned (having a numbered list with fullpath of application I can do completion
on is not what I did expect)

In emacs mode, the history search does not look great, (not it does not look
great as well in mksh, but less worse :))

In vi mode both seem to behave the same

Manpages in both sides looks pretty complete

mksh only depends on libc while ksh93 depends on libc, libexecinfo and libm

on amd64:
ksh93 is 1.2M
mksh is 331k

Overall I still think mksh is a better choice there

Best regards,
Bapt
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