[BusyBox] Re: which shell?

[Vladimir N. Oleynik]

Larry,

> Erik said:
> > ash, msh, and lash are certain to have a long life in busybox.
> > I really like hush, but I am not as certain of its future,
> 
> It's on my list, but my list is pretty long.
> 
> Ray L asked:
> > what is the reason for maintaining 3 or 4 shells, versus a single
> > shell with configuration-time feature selection?  surely a single
> > unified shell would reduce duplicated coding and debugging effort?
> 
> To which Erik answered:
> > They are all quite radically different from each other.
> 
> That's both true and false.  There are indeed dramatic differences
> between them, but some of that is fluff.  I think we (the maintainers)
> would benefit if some or all of the shells shared a common library of
> variable handling and tty handling.  Just like they share Vladimir's
> command line editor.  Also, one of my to-do items for hush is to drop
> Aaron's math handling into hush.  The more of this kind of work that
> gets done, the more similar the shells will become.
> 
> You never know where this giant Ouija board will take us.  I think
> it's too early to tell if some or all of these shells might end up
> close enough to have their source code merged with a compile-time
> selectable feature/size tradeoff.

As I hope busybox reflects for use in the builtin systems it would be strange, 
that some environments would enter into it (already in a binary kind). 
And as external functions increase size such approach very much is not pleasant
to me. 
I would prefer, that mathematical processing, for example, was connected as:
#include "aritch.c" 
in each shell.
My cmdedit I use in ftpclient (sourse in my ftp site).


--w
vodz