GOTCHA in !Ubuntu - broken assumption
Nigel Stewart
nigels at nigels.com
Sat Sep 29 04:11:46 EDT 2007
> It had never occurred to me THAT A DISTRO COULD DO SOMETHING AS
> DANGEROUSLY REGRESSIVE as change the default shell to something
> not backward compatible.
In practicality, I feel your pain. But my preference is for Linux
to be standards-based (POSIX in this case) rather than implementation-
based (such as bash or MS Windows). So I see the argument for
accepting dash as a POSIX-compliant baseline, and the hope that
the reasoning will take hold more broadly. And I'm impressed that
they've stood firm.
As a developer, I have considered it a bit sloppy to write bash
scripts with #!/bin/sh assuming that bash will always be the default.
But again, it's a pain to come across this kind of breakage,
even if it's motivated by longer term considerations.
Nigel
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