[Bashdb-devel] recent bashdb changes

[Rocky B. <roc...@gm...>]

Just so there is no surprise.  bashdb is undergoing a number of
changes I hope to make it better. There are also a few new features.
As a result, it's possible I'll mess up and CVS may be unstable. But
if you find that to be the case, let me know and I'll try to correct.

A couple of months back a book publisher asked me to write a book
about bash. Alas, although would really like a good one written at the
caliber of say the Pickaxe or Matz/Flannagan/Why book, this is
probably a little bit of stretch for me. In fact, there's only one
serious bash program I've ever written and as I look at it now there
is much that could be improved.

After consulting with colleagues, it seems that what's also needed is
a book on POSIX shell and something treating that as a programming
language and trying to put in in relation to other programming
languages. I've found that many of my colleagues really don't
understand why here this has to be done and there it works slightly
different, but have instead memorized a number of incantations that
(sometimes through painful experience) seems to work.

If anyone is interested in looking at bits I have right now the
contact me.  The shells, that attempt POSIX compatibility that I know
of are (in alphabetic order) are ash, bash, dash, ksh, and zsh.

Right now what I should be writing on is specifically the program
development part. But in order to do this I should understand what I'm
writing about.  Recently I've started work on both ksh and zsh
debuggers. Probably the ksh debugger will get done after zsh, unless
that get's snagged. My current thought is not to put this in
sourceforge under bashdb and CVS but maybe to switch to git somewhere
else, perhaps github.