On Tue, Jul 27, 1999 at 09:23:50PM +0100, Ian Smith wrote: > Anyway, the point. I noticed some discussion of linking ash to /bin/sh > instead of bash for non-interactive work, to speed things up and reduce > memory usage, on the linux devel list archives. Is ash available?
Not yet, but I may port it soon, if it is not too much trouble and nobody else beats me. > Would it be seen as a cooperative gesture to investigate this more fully > for the benefit of Debian as a whole? Well, there are several reasons why bash/ash discussion is not important for the Hurd: * The Hurd does use much fewer start up shells than Linux, because most information (network, mount points etc) is transient and stays alive during reboots (passive translators). There are only four or five scripts. * I would really like to avoid switching to another shell. This is because every bug that is not Hurd specific only interrupts my Hurd work. I prefer other people doing the work to find the bashisms in the scripts. So ash will not likely be the default from the first moment. * A slightly political reason that doesn't affect Debian but GNU/Hurd is that bash is the standard GNU shell, not ash. This is also a technical reasons, because Hurd improvements will go into bash faster than in any other shell. However, if it really boosts up the performance, we may consider this. On the other hand, as Donal Knuth said, preliminary optimization is evil, or, in other words, I prefer convenience and stability over performancew increase in this stage of our development. Thanks, Marcus -- `Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org finger brinkmd@ Marcus Brinkmann GNU http://www.gnu.org master.debian.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] for public PGP Key http://homepage.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/Marcus.Brinkmann/ PGP Key ID 36E7CD09
