oksh VS InitWare

David Korn's ksh93 was passed on to a new set of developers, who attempted to release a new version; AT&T rolled back these changes due to performance problems which raised questions of support status. It does appear that ksh93 development has resumed, and a new version was released late last year.

https://github.com/ksh93/ksh/releases

The independent pdksh spawned mksh, which is the default shell used in Android (as it has a BSD license); mksh appears to be very much active.

http://www.mirbsd.org/mksh.htm [https site has cert problems]

OpenBSD also forked oksh from pdksh. This is certainly well-maintained.

https://github.com/ibara/oksh

I don't know if this is helpful or just annoying unsolicited "advice"

Anyway, for those of us who like openbsd ksh(all two of us) which is derived from pdksh. there is the project oksh.

https://github.com/ibara/oksh

I like oksh: https://github.com/ibara/oksh

...and that ksh descended from pdksh, and is distributed as the oksh portable project here:

https://github.com/ibara/oksh

The MirBSD Korn Shell also descended from pdksh, and it can be found here:

http://www.mirbsd.org/mksh.htm

I don't know about the feature differences and code quality between these two; they both implement most of ksh88, and a small amount of ksh93.

I prefer mksh when I need something more than a POSIX shell.

Brian Callahan publishes a portable version here: https://github.com/ibara/oksh

Porting from OpenBSD, look for the portable versions and their compat layer. https://github.com/ibara/oksh/blob/master/portable.h

Fear not. They get to be part of the future too.

> Yes indeed, I should've expanded to requiring user namespaces and other kernel magic I can't expect from any random box i wanna work on.

That's fair, do have to make sure to avoid to modules that do user systemd services.

Longer term, though, I am hoping https://github.com/InitWare/InitWare will help with the userland part. And I hope to personally help with things like

https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-arch/2022-January...

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/f8457e20-c3cc-6e56-96a4-3090d7d...

to get us more sane cross-platform system calls.

I know, but support is still in FreeBSD. My big long term plan is:

1. Work on FreeBSD cross in Nixpkgs, because I need a way to pin forks and run nice tests without going insane. (We already have NetBSD cross.)

2. Rig up a booting image that uses https://github.com/InitWare/InitWare, the fork of systemd.

3. Add support to CloudABI in initware.

4. Bang on drum for other OSes and upstream systemd to implement this stuff we can can good portable abstractions -- I think this is our best shot to get "portable containers".

I haven't bothered to have a beef with systemd, but some of us have discussed https://github.com/InitWare/InitWare to support non-Linux kernels. That would be really fun.

I'm the first to admit that I'm ignorant of the facts here, but seeing that a systemd fork ran on OpenBSD for the first time two months ago does not give me confidence that it's "an option" in the sense that you can trust it to work well.

And to be pedantic (this is an OpenBSD thread, after all), it's not "systemd", it's a fork of systemd called "InitWare", and the GitHub repo describes it as "alpha software".

Someone also pointed out in the discussion you linked that it doesn't seem to include journald. Here's a relevant PR: https://github.com/InitWare/InitWare/pull/27

The project GitHub is found at https://github.com/InitWare/InitWare

You may have heard of InitWare https://github.com/InitWare/InitWare. Discussions, note that one of the titles is misleading: