Importing mksh in base

[Simon J. Gerraty]

Baptiste Daroussin <bapt at FreeBSD.org> wrote:

> 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)

Is is "better" than pdksh?  I've used that since about '89
(bias alert I was maintainer for about 10 years)
never had problem with it - it's the ksh on netbsd fwiw.

emacs mode in pdksh is pretty good (again biased - I put a lot of work
into it).

I pinched the src from netbsd to build for freebsd (for junos ;-).
Is 400k figure below statically linked?

-r-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel   217K Mar  5  2018 /bin/ksh

/packages/mnt/ksh32-cd051739/bin/ksh: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel
80386, version 1 (FreeBSD), dynamically linked, interpreter
/libexec/ld-elf.so.1, FreeBSD-style, for FreeBSD 11.0 (1100120), not
stripped

--sjg

> 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