The original Thompson shell was principally written by Ken Thompson of Bell Labs. However, it should be noted that other individuals at Bell Labs also had a role in its development: Dennis M. Ritchie, M. D. McIlroy, J. F. Ossanna, and quite likely others as well. Jeffrey Allen Neitzel is the principal developer and maintainer of the enhanced, backward-compatible port of the Version 6 (V6) UNIX Thompson shell (and all other software) released as part of the etsh project. ============ Definitions: compatibility - backward compatibility osh - enhanced port of the Version 6 (V6) UNIX Thompson shell (etsh is the new default binary name for osh) sh6 - port of the Version 6 (V6) UNIX Thompson shell (tsh is the new default binary name for sh6) (sh6 references implicitly include glob(6)) === Notice that I have released six different incarnations of osh(1) since July 2003. The origin and primary objectives of each one are described below. ================================ [osh-030730 through osh-060124]: The first incarnation was originally authored by Gunnar Ritter as osh-020214/osh.c and was then adopted by Jeffrey Allen Neitzel. Unfortunately, the design of Gunnar's implementation was incompatible with the Thompson shell in several respects. Thus, it required a lot of workarounds in order to fix the design incompatibilities. I modified Gunnar's design to separate command-line parsing and execution so that the shell could at least be compatible in the most basic sense. The only catch was that word splitting was still incompatible. Thus, this partial solution was always destined for eventual replacement. Primary objective was compatibility. === ==================================== [osh-20061230 through osh-20100228]: The second incarnation was originally authored by Ken Thompson in Version 6 UNIX as /usr/source/s2/sh.c and was then ported by Jeffrey Allen Neitzel for personal use in January 2004. I eventually released it as sh6(1) in osh-060124. Then, after its release, I realized that the design of the original shell (see: osh-060124/*6.c) offered a far better starting point for making osh(1) truly backward-compatible with the Thompson shell. Bothered by the fact that osh(1) still had incompatible word-splitting behavior, I abandoned the design used in the first incarnation, adapted sh6.c and glob6.c, copied them to osh.c, and began working on it during my free time in 2006. Finally, I released the new incarnation of osh(1) in osh-20061230. Primary objective was compatibility. === ==================================== [osh-20100430 through osh-20141024]: The third incarnation continues with primary objectives of compatibility and long-term stability. Consequently, all new features (if/when added) must work in concert with primary objectives. Otherwise, they will not be added. === ================================= [osh-20150115 through osh-4.3.2]: The fourth incarnation continues with primary objectives of compatibility and long-term stability. It is not a new incarnation per se, but a shift of version-number perspective or a bit like shifting gears from third to fourth if you will. So then, where osh-20150115 was osh-4.0.0 in spirit and osh-20160108 was osh-4.1.0 in spirit, osh-4.2.0 could have been osh-20160420 in reverse spirit if you like. Now though, version numbers for osh releases use a major.minor.patch, non-date-based format, instead of a YYYYMMDD, date-based one. See Makefile.config for details. === =============================== [osh-4.4.0 through etsh-4.9.0]: The fifth incarnation continues with primary objectives of compatibility and long-term stability. It simply contains some changes to help work around a binary name conflict that need not exist. See CHANGES and CHANGES-tsh+ for details. === ================================== [etsh-5.0.0 through etsh-current]: The sixth incarnation of the etsh project is here, continuing with primary objectives of compatibility and long-term stability. Now, without binary name conflict .. Yay ! =^) === I wish to thank the original authors very much for their efforts. Without their previous work, none of this software or documentation would exist today. See the DEDICATIONS file for further info. Jeffrey Allen Neitzel 2018/12/16 @(#)$Id: AUTHORS,v 1.3 2018/12/15 23:36:22 jneitzel Exp $