On Thu, 11 Feb 2016, Makarius wrote:

I am a long-term user of GNU bash who is depending on the "export -f" feature of that shell (in an application that is on the free market for decades). The bash guys turn a shell function "foo" into the environment variable "BASH_FUNC_foo%%" and hope to be able to pick it up later on.

Dash gets into this game, because Ubuntu and Debian have chosen to make it the default for /bin/sh some years ago. This means that typical "system" invocations of Unix tools and libraries are now going through dash: /bin/sh -c is often seen in practice instead of more delicate execve invocations.

This means with /bin/sh -> dash users have no proper chance to avoid it. Sitting right there in the center /bin/sh, dash acquires special responsibilities to play nice with other shells.

After reading the official (!) sources of bash-4.3, I've found out the following: Not the bash guys are introducing this ill-formed name decoration "%%", but the Debian guys. See http://sourcesdev.debian.net/patches/bash/4.3-14/bash43-027.diff

This means dash is not working against bash, but against Debian. Or rather: Debian is working against themselves and their users.


        Makarius

--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe dash" in
the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html

Reply via email to