Here is a nice illustration in support of arguments made in this
discussion. I am a visitor, I tried Ubuntu to see whether it is worth
while to consider switching to Ubuntu. I got stuck with (1) some simple
scripts that use shell variable indirection and dont work in Ubuntu and
(2) the vpnc library package not working in Ubuntu - I need vpnc to
connect to my universities intranet.
I lost about 1/2 day to discover that sh is not sh and to figure out a
work-around. And I lost nearly another 1/2 day to dig into bash manuals,
Posix specifications, understanding the reasoning - and to discover the
present discussion.
Lessons learned under the bottom line: (a) programmes dont run on Ubuntu
that run on other distributions and (b) Ubuntu does not check whether
their library packages run (reading this discussion: does not care?). I
translate this - maybe too harshly put - to: unless you consider
compliance to Posix as quality, Ubuntu lacks quality.
The speed argument is pure theory: how much time does an average
application spend executing shell scripts, and what is the average time
needed on a somewhat recent computer? And, system installation time on
Ubuntu with Dash and on Mandriva without Dash is very comparable.
My conclusion: For a user who does not want to invest all that time (and
has the skills to do it), but who wants to do "a little bit more than
office applications" Ubuntu is not adequate.
A contribution to the technical part of this discsussion: I stumbled
over the following shell constructs that run in Bash (and Sh) but not in
Dash:
x=${!y} (indirection: read a variable whose name is the value of
another one)
for ((i = 0 ; i < 3 ; i++ )) ; do
... snip ...
done
(a very simplified copy of code I extracted from the vpnc-script file from the
vpn library package - vpnc-script lines 225 and on)
--
Script that are using bash could be broken with the new symlink
https://launchpad.net/bugs/61463
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