> One thing about this which strikes me as a bit ironic is debian's use of > the dash shell, made to be POSIX-compliant, and so causing endless > problems for scripts using bash's additional non-POSIX functionality, > but not specifying bash explicitly in the shebang line.
Hmm - that might require some background: I'd venture that most of these scripts were written when sh was just a symlink to bash, and dash didn't exist, nevermind as a debian package. The word decree is too strong, but at some point debian system scripts were supposed to be written to be /bin/dash compatible, but instead of changing all existing system scripts to start with /bin/bash, and only replacing them with /bin/sh once full checked/rewritten, they were kept at /bin/sh as people hoped for the best - a quick win. I, for one, never bought into the reasoning for migrating system scripts away from bash to sh. The argument that bash is too large struck me as odd - there were critical dependencies on perl and python with a much larger dependency graph, and much bigger startup costs... More importantly I think it is good that one uses the same language that one types into the terminal every day when extending the distribution - that makes a sysadmin equal to the distribution maintainer, instead of specialising that into a different caste... regards marc _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list [email protected] https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
