I had a thought the other day, that one could implement a Bourne shell interpreter in a more widely available language such as Python. This would provide a more widely portable option for using Git, and on Windows in particular. Such a shell implementation would provide the minimum implementation necessary to run Git's shell scripts (and which would include minimal implementations of various utitilies such as grep, sed, and awk). That wouldn't solve the Perl script problem, so it seems obvious that a portable shell interpreter designed for use with Git should be written in Perl.
A long time ago there was the Perl Power Tools project, which aimed to provide implementations of various Unix utilities in native Perl. Unfortunately, nobody ever submitted an implementation for sh. Is there any existing implementation of a Bourne-like shell in Perl? More generally, is this a viable plan to make Git work better on Windows?
Update: See the next post to find out just how far I got with this.
