Re: ash vs. bash

[Jules Bean <jules@jellybean.co.uk>]

Michael Stone wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Jul 19, 1999 at 05:51:35PM +0100, Jules Bean wrote:
> > Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> > > b. Make ash the /bin/sh default shell.
> > >
> > > Easy. Manage /bin/sh by update-alternatives.
> 
> No. update-alternatives is too fragile for this role. (If /bin/sh
> breaks, the system is pretty dead.)
> 
> > This is what I meant.  b - make ash the /bin/sh shell - because it is
> > faster, and equally POSIX compliant.
> 
> If people are going to keep making this claim, someone needs to post
> some useful numbers. I'm not interested in whether ash starts .2s faster
> than bash; if people want to argue that using ash speeds up the system,
> let's have some real comparisons of common system tasks. I'd like to see
> some real justification before breaking a working system.

You can hunt through the mailing list archives for last time this
discussion came up.  There are speed advantages. IIRC, they are
considerable on slow machines (386/486),.

n any case, I think we should at least *support* the ability to change
your /bin/sh, which means changing /bin/bash so it doesn't alter the
/bin/sh symlink as long as it points to an executable file.

Assuming Guy is busy, maybe someone who understands the internals of the
bash package could NMU this?

Jules