future of ksh package

[joerg van den hoff]

hi there,

not that long ago I asked for updating the ksh package and ryan thankfully did that and interacted a 
bit with the ast/ksh project ("ksh2020") at github in the process.

in the intervening months I had to learn, however, (by working with the "new" ksh and by interacting 
with the maintainers on github) that what has happened to ksh93 in that project (and so far 
continues to happen) is not altogether good (to say the least): serious regressions (and trivial, 
easily triggerable ones made it into their "stable" first release), strange decisions by the main 
"coder" like insisting to change default cd behaviour, performance breakdown compared to ksh93u+ by 
200-300% (and no solution or attempt to seriously address this issue apart from reverting some 
compiler flags in sight).

against this background, the second maintainer of the k2020 project now conceded on IRC that it 
might be wise to provide not only ksh2020 but also legacy ksh93u+ packages for fedora (he's working 
for RedHat and in charge of the ksh package(s) there it seems), while the mksh author yesterday 
opened this issue at debian:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=948745

which basically states the same request there which I herewith would raise for macports as well:

please reanimate a "real" ksh93 package of that name containing the last release from ast/Korn (i.e. 
ksh93u+ 2012-08-01) and rename the current ksh package to ksh2020 or similar. also if possible, make 
them _both_ installable side by side (and maybe "select"able to being assessed under the canonical 
'ksh' name).

the situation for osx is currently not as grave as with debian (and, seemingly (I have been told), 
for FreeBSD) in that we still have /bin/ksh available (which is 93u+) -- while those distros now 
only have ksh2020 --  but I believe it would be good if macports would also have its own ksh93u+ 
package just in case apple decides to get rid of it, e.g.

in my view, for the time being, it is very clear that ksh2020 is not a viable drop-in replacement 
for ksh93u+. if it ever gets there, remains to be seen.

thank you for macports

joerg