> Just letting everyone know what's coming up pretty soon...
>
>
> Within the next day or two (or maybe even this evening), I am going to be
> syncing out a whole pile of stuff including a few bug fixes, new
> pine/imapd and mutt packages, and openssl/openssh! Yes, that's finally
> going into the main distribution. As soon as I see that Patrick has
> uploaded all that to the ftp site, I'll sync out. Yes, I am sitting on
> that stuff for now :)
>
openssl/openssh is great news. Will openssh replace telnet in a default
install, or will they be available side by side?
>
> I'll wait a few days for everyone to sync that stuff down and test it.
> Then, I'll be sending out KDE 2.0.1 packages with ssl support. That will
> be another big, complicated download. That's why I am going to put some
> space between that and the ssl stuff.
>
Good idea, now all I need is to get X running on my box and I'll be ale
to play with KDE 2.0.1 on the Alpha ;-) nice!
>
> Then, I'll be playing games with the shell. We are merging ksh into
> Slackware. I'll be doing things a bit differently from the Intel
> distribution - namely, placing ksh in as the system's sh. It seems to be
> functioning just fine on my test machines. Also, I'm thinking about
> renaming bash to bash2, and bash1 to bash. That means that bash 1.14.7
> would be "bash". So make menuconfig would work.
>
I agree 100% with making bash == bash1 and the current bash == bash2, but
I am not too happy with the ksh idea for several reasons. First of all,
the bash shell is standard. No matter what distribution you use you can
always count on bash being the default (except for some minor distros).
Secondly, many scripts from various sources expect bash to be the default
shell, and some of those would possibly break due to this change (I know
that ksh uses standard bourne shell syntax, but there may be subtle
differences). Thirdly, I have had some (not much) experience with ksh
from AIX and IMHO bash is the better shell - I think this would be a step
backwards. I agree that ksh and bash are very similar, but there are some
annoying differenes (I am speaking from past experience, ksh may have
improved since). When I used ksh, it could not do history expansion ( !
in bash) which is the thing I remember as most annoying.
All in all I think ksh is the best alternative to bash if you have to
choose (you could have said csh -[shudder]-). And I won't oppose this if
you feel it is the way to go (not that I have much to say in the matter
anyway ;), but I think the better approach would be to try and help the
bash2 developers iron out the alpha bugs and just use ksh as a temporary
replacement (but leave it in the distro afterwards for people to use if
they wish).
I'll stop ranting about ksh now and get on with my kernel building ;-)
>
> Finally, it'll be time to merge in the 2.2.18 kernel.
>
>
> So, lots of stuff will be changing soon! It should be very exciting
> stuff. There might be a lot of testing to do. Oh, and then I'm going to
> be gone for 12 days for Christmas, so I'll only have limited access to
> mail and development machines.
Well, you wil have left us plenty of stuff to test during those 12 days,
so I guess we will manage ;-)
You are doing a great job, I'm looking forward to the next update!
Best regards,
Jesper Juhl
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri May 09 2003 - 10:00:02 PDT