[illumos-Developer] review: nuke staleness from svr4pkg

[Garrett D'Amore]

There were many reasons that patchadd and patchrm had to go.  Shell
compatibility was probably the least of these.

	- Garrett

On Tue, 2010-10-19 at 07:45 +0200, Roland Mainz wrote:
> 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
>