Re: ash vs. bash

[Steve Greenland <stevegr@debian.org>]

On 19-Jul-99, 13:33 (CDT), Steve Lamb <morpheus@rpglink.com> wrote: 
> On Mon, 19 Jul 1999 18:28:46 +0200, Carlo Strozzi wrote:
> >Oh, not at all, I didn't mean that. I definitely think most people
> >(including myself) would like to stick to bash for interactive use;
> >it should continue to be required, or at least important.
> 
>     But if bash is no longer /bin/sh why keep it important or recommended at
> all when there are other interactive shells out there?  tcsh, zsh both come
> to mind.

Because we have long had two (policies is not the correct word, let's
say commitments):

1. /bin/sh is a posix compliant shell. Scripts that use bashisms need to
begin with "#! /bin/bash".

2. Bash is one of the standard scripting languages, and will always be
available, just like awk. In particular, maintainer scripts are free to
use bash (so long as they follow #1).

#1 is what lets us change the default /bin/sh to any posix compliant sh.
If ash provides this, cool. But you can't just yank bash off the system
and expect things to work. And I don't see a *significant* benefit in
doing so. 

Steve