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Fedora Mailing List Discusses Replacement of Bash

posted by janrinok on Thursday October 02 2014, @09:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the bash-dash-ash-mish-mash dept.

Lagg writes:

An interesting thread has been started on the Fedora mailing list proposing that Bash be replaced with Dash as the core (/bin/sh) shell. It should be noted though that this is still a thread discussion as far as I know, not a policy decision announcement, and nothing concrete has been reached.

Personally and even though this proposal seems at least partially based on the recent Shellshock hysteria I'm happy to see that people are finally starting to consider things like technical superiority and simplicity over politics, and treating bloat and feature creep as far from harmless. I also hope that other distribution maintainers have the same kind of discussion. I'd like to see Arch for example start using dash in the core install since even with shell script heavy systems - like those that use sysvinit - very rarely are non-POSIX features used and, when they are, they probably shouldn't be.

For those unaware dash is a tiny and robust shell that aims for strict POSIX conformance with as small a runtime and disk footprint as possible. It was originally a fork of ash which is a pretty good shell for embedded or otherwise thin systems and is what is built into busybox for a shell. Here is its official page.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by Lagg on Friday October 03 2014, @06:38AM

    by Lagg (105) on Friday October 03 2014, @06:38AM (#101286) Homepage Journal

    Not really, when argv[0] has a basename of sh bash starts in posix mode. Like most GNU stuff that has a posix or other spec conformance mode the crap still leaks through to an extent but to say that there's no difference in practice is just stupid.

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  • (Score: 2) by zocalo on Friday October 03 2014, @04:28PM

    by zocalo (302) on Friday October 03 2014, @04:28PM (#101445)
    You misunderstand me, I think. Yes, Bash starts in Posix mode (which GNU's own manual states only makes the shell "conform more closely to the POSIX standard") but if you look at the list of differences [gnu.org] that makes, there's still a lot of room for using Bash specific functionality that isn't present in the sh spec. It was that specific functionality I was referring to rather than stuff like how expansion and redirection are handled, e.g. the difference between using (say) "/bin/dash" and "/bin/bash" as the system shell. Bash's Posix mode definitely helps with portability, but it's still easy to come unstuck if you are doing anything esoteric, although to be fair the most common portability issues are more likely to be through use of GNU shell tool specific command line options than anything internal to bash itself.
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