On 02.03.2011 16:54, Nick Coghlan wrote:
/tangent
Does this discussion remind anyone else of the bash/dash switch for /usr/bin/sh in Ubuntu?
The distro itself coped fine, but 3rd party shell scripts that used bash extensions were a whole different story.
(No, I'm not sure what lessons, if any, we can draw from that. It just struck me as an interesting parallel worth mentioning)
I think that comparison is wrong. /bin/sh is defined to point to a Bourne compatible shell. If you use bash features, and you are not using /bin/bash, then you are calling for trouble. With /bin/sh, there is a standard what to expect, and you can write /bin/sh scripts which conform to all /bin/sh implementations. Compare that to /usr/bin/python and try to define how to write a script that works with reasonable new 2.x and 3.x python versions. Maybe there is a small subset of scripts (not using any third party python package), but how would such a "standard" be useful? Then even better point /usr/bin/python to /usr/bin/perl6, then at least all scripts break consistently ;) Matthias