[illumos-Developer] review: nuke staleness from svr4pkg

[Roland Mainz]

On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 7:18 AM, Alan Coopersmith
<alan.coopersmith at oracle.com> wrote:
>> I think this is covered already.   "patchadd" and its ilk are closed
>> source, and basically are utter garbage anyway.
>
> Actually, source was available for patchadd & patchrm (they are shell
> scripts after all), and they were included in first release of the
> OpenSolaris distro, before they were removed for being incompatible
> with ksh93:
>        https://defect.opensolaris.org/bz/show_bug.cgi?id=1944

Erm... AFAIK this was less a problem with ksh93 and more an issue that
Sun "enhanced" Solaris ksh88 and switched "typeset -i" from a 32bit
integer declaration to to a 64bit integer declaration (which was wrong
(and badly implemented), broke some scripts, broke interoperability
and _now_ again causes trouble because Sun's script now rely on this
Solaris-specific feature). Sun once had the OpenGroup patch to add
"typeset -l -i" to ksh88 (basically a backport from early ksh93
versions) but instead opted to increase the datatype width for
"typeset -i" instead (because it was easier/faster to implement (see
[1] below, the management thought it is easier to do this instead of
replacing s/typeset -i/integer/g in the SystemV package scripts).

[1]=The korn shell (written for ksh88, but it applies to current and
all planned versions of ksh93, too) documentation (e.g.
http://www.amazon.com/New-KornShell-Command-Programming-Language/dp/0131827006)
explicitly says that the alias "integer" always refers to the largest
integer datatype available to the interpreter, e.g. 32bit for ksh88
and 64bit for current ([2]) ksh93 versions (fortunately even Solaris
ksh88).
[2]=Once |int128_t| becomes more common we'll see 128bit integers in
ksh93, too (but implemented via a new typeset option to avoid that we
break scripts which explicitly requested a specific datatype (but the
"integer" alias will then refer to the larger datatype (see [1]))).

----

Bye,
Roland

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