[Portland] Scripts Are Written for Bash But Run With #!/bin/sh -- Broken on Ubuntu 7.04 (And 6.10?)

[Kevin Krammer]

On Freitag, 27. April 2007 +0100, Nathan Kidd wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I just discovered yesterday that xdk-utils is broken on X/K/Ubuntu 7.04
> (and it seems 6.10, though I only tried 7.04) because they switched to
> using Dash as the /bin/sh symlink, instead of Bash.  Like many other
> scripts (my own xdk-utils wrapper included), the xdk-utils scripts
> execute with #!/bin/sh but actually use bashisms (e.g. pushd/popd).
>
> I believe we need to change the xdk-utils scripts to either A) use
> strict POSIX shell commands only (more work, but more portable), or B)
> change to #!/bin/bash explicitly (easy to do, potentially less portable).

I think, if possible, we should try to keep /bin/sh and fix the problems.

> Why they changed from bash to dash: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DashAsBinSh
>
> Several long discussions, the summary of which is: "Yes we know changing
> to dash as /bin/sh is going to break stuff.  No, we won't change back
> because we get serious performance benefits from dash. Any script that
> requires bash but only asks for /bin/sh is broken."

I wish them good luck. A friend of mine is the maintianer of "grml" [1], which 
is also a Debian based distribution, and at one point they tried to use zsh 
as the default shell because it is more powerful than bash, but they had to 
give up after some time because there are just too much such /bin/sh 
== /bin/bash assumptions in Debian's (and other's) scripts.

Nevertheless, we should try to make our scripts work correctly.
Would it possible for you to compile a list of  breakages?

Cheers,
Kevin

[1] www.grml.org

-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
KDE user support, developer mentoring
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