*BinPkg question

[Blibbet <blibbet@gmail.com>]

I've been working on building thumbdrives that boot into the UEFI Shell,
and have a few end-user questions, please.

I've always been unclear which version of EFI/UEFI Apple includes on
their hardware. Are the older EdkShellBinPkg shells suitable for modern
Apple boxes, or will the modern UEFI Shell work on them?

What is the point of shipping compiled full/minimal UEFI Shells, and not
shipping the related external tools? I presumed the point of shipping
the shell.efi binaries in the EDK2 was to help users who need to add a
shell to their system for some diagnostic reasons. If that's the point,
wouldn't it be useful to have the related external shell commands that
help with diagnosis and configuring boot### variables?

It appears older EFI Shell did include external binaries, but results
vary greatly by architecture, it appears AArch32 includes the most
commands. Some use an ./Apps subdirectory, others do not.

https://github.com/tianocore/edk2/tree/master/EdkShellBinPkg/Bin/

but modern bin package only include shells (and omits IPF binaries,
unlike earlier EdkShellBinPkg):

https://github.com/tianocore/edk2/tree/master/ShellBinPkg

I am unclear why include just a shell and not include the related
external commands in the ShellBinPkg.

Is there a reason for modern released systems that these older
EdkShellBinPkg shells/commands will be needed?

Is there another source of precompiled external shell commands, beyond
ShellBinPkg, that would work with the shells included in the ShellBinPkg?

The target audience for this is sysadmins, so telling them to build it
from source is not an option for audience.

Thanks for *any* advise!

Lee Fisher