Magnus Bäck <baeck@xxxxxxxxxx>: > While "constant traffic" probably overstates the issue, these are not > theoretical problems. I recall at least three cases in the last year > or so where Git has seen breakage with Solaris or Mac OS X because > of sed or tr incompatibilities, and I don't even read this list that > thoroughly. This is exactly the sort of of pain experience would lead me to expect. OK, this is where I assume the full Old Fart position (30-year old-school Unix guy, author of "The Art of Unix Programming", can remember the years before Perl and still has sh idioms in his fingertips) and say "Get with the 21st century, people! Or at least 1990..." As a general scripting language shell sucks *really badly* compared to anything new-school. Performance, portability, you name it, it's a mess. It's not so much the shell interpreters itself that are the portabilty problem, but (as Magnus implicitly points out) all those userland dependencies on sed and tr and awk and even variants of expr(!) that get dragged in the second you try to get any actual work done. Can we cease behaving like we're still pounding keys on 110-baud teletypes now? Some old-school Unix habits have persisted long past the point that they're even remotely sane. Shell programming at any volume above a few lines of throwaway code is one of them - it's *nuts* and we should *stop doing it*. (Yes, I too still make this mistake occasionally out of ancient reflex. But I know I shouldn't, and I always end up regretting it.) -- <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a> -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html