Re: portability as a goal for debian?

["John H. Robinson, IV" <jhriv@ucsd.edu>]

On Wed, Mar 07, 2001 at 03:51:15PM +0000, Lars Wirzenius wrote:
> 
> Similarly, if a bash script is much simpler than a more portable sh
> script, and the target platform (Debian) is guaranteed to have bash,
> why not use it?

i do not think that was the issue per se; but the script should be
invoked as #!/bin/bash as opposed to assuming that /bin/sh is really
/bin/bash.

i think it is also historical. we have always had bash, and that was the
default. in today's more enlightened age (take that with a grain of
salt) we see that instead of using a ``bloated'' sh, we try to strive
for a more streamlined POSIX shell (such as ash). this way the essentail
stuff is as small as it can be.

note: there is nothing that can do dpkg's job that is smaller than dpkg.
      replacing perl with mawk and sed is smaller than perl. however,
      perl can do lots more than sed+mawk

% for i (perl-5.005 mawk sed){echo -ne ${i/-*/}:\\t;apt-cache show $i|grep ^I}                                               
perl:   Installed-Size: 6732
mawk:   Installed-Size: 142
sed:    Installed-Size: 200

-john