4.1.1 timescale, longer term ideas

[Oliver Kiddle <okiddle@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

 --- Peter Stephenson <pws@xxxxxxx> wrote: 

> There's no target date for 4.1.1; I'm still vaguely waiting for some
> major change to justify it, in particular improvements in the

I'd agree that there needs to be more by way of significant changes in
4.1 before we can justify a 4.1.1. After 4.1.1, I'd suggest that we do
away with -dev releases and have fairly regular 4.1.x releases. -dev
releases were very valuable before we had CVS and daily snapshots and
when they came out fortnightly. Now, we just seem to have rather a lot
of choices between stable releases and bleeding edge from cvs.

> parameter
> code to make things like discipline functions easier.

The biggest problem facing us with respect to allowing discipline
functions is the complete lack of function scoping or some other way to
associate functions to variables unambiguously.

> But every time I
> look at the code I stop looking at it after a bit.  The only vague
> conclusion I've come to is that it might be a good idea to use some
> form
> of vtable for storing stuff common to all parameters of a particular

That sounds similar to the ideas I had. I was thinking of an OO like
solution and of making other aspects of the shell (such as functions
and traps) be in effect a type of parameter. There might then only be
one set of code for scoping etc. I concluded with the nameref stuff I
never finished that it might be easier to start again with the
parameter code if we want the other ksh93 features too. But if it is
going to be rewritten then it'd seem sensible to try to add unicode
support at the same time. I think our best approach to handling unicode
would be first to decide where we will use what encoding (UTF-8/wchars
etc), add autoconf handling with a --enable option and then fix
different parts of the code as and when until, after some time, we're
finished. Now, if I could just find myself a job that didn't involve 5
hours on the train every day, I might have time to actually do some of
this.

Oliver

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