On Wed, Dec 21, 2005 at 08:44:11AM +0100, Patrick Leslie Polzer wrote: > >Hello, > >I'd like to discuss a difficult topic without starting a religious >debate. Arch and most, if not all, other distributions (rescue CDs >exempt) use bash as the default shell. I wonder especially why Arch >does this.
History! bash seems to be the de-facto shell of Linux. AFAIK every distribution uses it as its default shell. This means that a lot of shell scripts in the wild is written to be executed by it (#! /bin/bash), quite a few pretend to not be (#! /bin/sh) but use bashisms. In short, I think it's prudent to keep requiring bash to be installed and that /bin/sh points to /bin/bash. >zsh is a superset of bash and much more powerful. I personally use zsh, so I wouldn't mind if it became the default shell in Arch :-) However I think Arch would loose some Linux karma by changing the default shell. I also wouldn't dare saying that zsh is a proper superset of bash. >fish is probably bash-compatible to a sane extent and very >user-friendly and fast. > >So why stick to bash? Arch could excel in this issue, too, by >installing zsh or fish as default in / and moving bash to /usr as an >optional package. I would vote for continued use of bash as default shell, it's simply what a whole lot of people expect to see when they log into their shiny new Linux system. I wouldn't mind if zsh moved into /bin though to signal that it's a proper member of the Arch shell-family. /M -- Magnus Therning (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4) [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://therning.org/magnus Software is not manufactured, it is something you write and publish. Keep Europe free from software patents, we do not want censorship by patent law on written works. Never be afraid to try something new. Remember, amateurs built the ark; professionals built the Titanic. -- Anonymous
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