Re: Proposed new POSIX sh policy
On Sat, Nov 11, 2006 at 11:10:52PM -0600, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
[snip]
>
> It is my opinion that we would be better off dumping this
> whole shell specification thing in policy, standardizing on bash, and
> let it go.
You know, people base embedded systems on Debian. And as long as the
ballpark of all initscripts are written in POSIX shell, it's really easy
to dump bash completely on those systems, since most embedded systems
only use a fairly limited set of packages anyway. But if a significant
number of packages (especially the essential & required ones) begin
using bash-only features, we'll lose that ability.
On an embedded system, noone really cares whether the shell has
smart tab-expansion, customisable prompts, etc.
Only a few things count: memory footprint (including dependencies that
are not needed elsewhere), storage footprint (again including
dependencies) and speed of execution. For all of these, dash is
a far better choice than bash.
I wouldn't give up bash bash on any of my desktop systems - it's a
really nice shell to do work in - but all scripts I write can be run
using any of the SuSv3-compliant shells available in Debian...
Regards: David
--
/) David Weinehall <tao@debian.org> /) Rime on my window (\
// ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ // Diamond-white roses of fire //
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