GOTCHA in !Ubuntu - broken assumption

[Nigel Stewart]

> 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