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Neil Williams wrote: > > Umm, Debian is also dropping bash as the default shell. That doesn't make it any smarter. Kind of the nature of ideas that they are smart or stupid, independent of how many people accept them. The "goal" seems to be to make dash install as /bin/sh, I didn't see a reference to Debian changing its default shell, rather that "dash" should work for those that prefer it and ask for it to be installed as the default shell. > bash is just too slow, especially at boot time. I don't buy that. Bash is known to be slow and bloated, on the other hand in the last 5 or years I've been using Debian CPUs have gotten about 8 times faster, so there is a new requirement that shell scripts be a few percentage points faster because the 8 fold speed up wasn't enough? If speed was the issue one would get a far bigger speed up moving the lsb init-function declarations into the parent shell, rather than sourcing them in about half the start-up scripts. 69 startup scripts (out of 104) source this set of functions on my box to define the same set of functions, so that is 68 script invocations that can go immediately. PHP's "include once" seems so clever in comparison ;) The question isn't whether dash is better, faster, or anything else, it is about backward compatibility. It is especially daft in Debian derivatives before Debian has made the switch - but it looks like pointless drift in Debian to me. Indeed if some bashisms are fixed by #!/bin/bash, then small systems will need both Bash and Dash installed, and we'll have increased the footprint and memory demands (and probably slow booting). One reference suggested dash was proposed because it had a smaller footprint and thus more robust, but the root shell on many old Unix systems was statically linked (hence /sbin/sh), precisely to avoid dependencies on a wide bit of the file system that might not be mounted, or might be damaged. One could do that with bash (making it more bloated and slower) if that was the real reason. So it looks like a couple of developers prefer dash and have been working through 200 odd bashisms in Debian for a goal that probably won't noticeably advance Debian. Their time I guess, although no doubt a lot of the work was done by other DDs. Don't get me wrong I like standards, and I think it nice that Debian is moving to posix compliance for so many scripts. But the first bug report I opened, also mentioned that upstream code in the package (not just the Debian glue and install scripts) broke because it had a bashism in it. There is a special place in Usenet Unix folk law for people stupid enough to change the default shell of root on their Unix systems, let us hope we don't have to place the entire Debian project in that category.
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