Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-kernel (148 mails)

[Rob OpenSuSE <rob.opensuse.linux@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

2009/1/15 Bernhard Walle <bwalle@xxxxxxx>:
> * Rob OpenSuSE [2009-01-15 14:18]:
> > That's probably one of the Fedora-ism's that are mentioned in the post
> > about it.  Many distro's use a different shell than bash, as a boot
> > optimisation, because well written scripts don't rely on bash specific
> > extensions.
>
> Define well-written. If you rely only on POSIX, you have two problems:
>
>  - there is no real test shell available that implements POSIX and only
>   POSIX,
>  - you need lots of external tools for everything, which is slow,
>  - sometimes bash-specific syntax is more readable than POSIX syntax.
>
> I think dash implements bash-specific syntax and not only POSIX. Not as
> much as Bash itself, but much more than POSIX.

No need, you make the point for me.  Other shells implement the
features that are going to make sense for such scripts.  I'm quite
happy for "well written" to be works, on shells used to bring up a
system.  I'd be very suprised if mounting a root file system, has to
rely on obscure bash specific features.

Remembering more, actually Fedora uses "nash" according to discussion
at LWN of Dave Jone's suggestion.  So that suggestion for "/bin/bash"
being the path used is incorrect.

So I have no idea why that path would be bash, and also evidence to
suggest that it's proven to be a poor choice in practice (Fedora nash,
Ubuntu dash).

Choosing POSIX as a baseline would preclude a benefit of accessible
source, where a shell builtin might be a much more elegant solution.
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