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Comment by discreditable | Hacker News Reader

Will this version of powershell ever be baked-in to Windows? My Windows 10 1909 install is currently 5.1.

Powershell Core 6.0 wasn't fully backwards compatible. I imagine that full backwards compatibility would be a requirement to replace 5.1.

It looks like Powershell 7 still can't run some 5.1 scripts. Here's a compatibility table: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/whats-...

They changed the default path outout of applets like get-childitem. Microsoft employees stated that this would break many older scripts, but it wasn't listed as a breaking change.

It's unlikely to ever reach even generally acceptable levels of compatibility with the built-in version.

There's no reason to bake tools like this into an OS or tie them to OS versions. Download the tools you need. If you need to "bake" them anywhere, bake them into your containers.

The reason is to have a standard shell that is there on every OS.

Not everything is servers and containers.

How many non-server machines do you find yourself regularly needing a shell on where downloading it isn't an option? Why does it need to be pre-installed?

Why is there a standard shell in POSIX? Because it is such a fundamental dependency, it saves a lot of trouble if it can be relied upon.

On the other hand reliance on bash-specific features is a net negative for GNU/linux.

The most used shell in *nix land is bash, but bash is significantly bigger than POSIX. This in practice means that many shell scripts are more bash-compliant than POSIX compliant.

It is part of the reason why it was good news when ubuntu/debian decided to transition to dash.

The documentation notes that MSIX installers should be built (I didn't see any in the GitHub Releases, so maybe it is a coming soon thing), so I'm hoping that also means a possible option to install and update it from the Store. That would at least "feel" a little more baked-in to Windows than installing from a GitHub Release page.

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