This work had much more to do with a bad cold and a lot of low-concentration downtime than anything else. But thanks for the kind words @stkr (Peter, should I pronounce that sticker, stacker or stinker?).
Although I would love to see shell in the main distro, it raises some security concerns which make it potentially unsuitable. In particular, it's possible to run something like "rm -rf /" (or "rd /s /q c:\" for our new Windows friends) and erase quite a bit of your hard drive, even without using sudo.
I know this, because I tried it once, in public, in a cavalier and humiliating attempt to demonstrate how benign the object is. This was probably 15 years ago, and OSX may be more resilient in the meantime. But back then, I had to restore from a backup and lost some work.
I can imagine one's displeasure when opening someone's awesome new M4L device which contains [loadbang]-(rm -rf ~/)-[shell]. So _not_ including shell in the main distro would prevent a worldwide Maxtastrophe, at least for the many users who don't install edgy third party externals.
Maybe we (C74) don't care, though. But since our patcher format isn't really legible, it's not the same as distributing source code, where you can scan through and see that something funny might be going on. I would personally err on the side of caution.
