Re: [gentoo-dev] Network configuration and bash

[Roy Marples]

On Tue, 6 Feb 2007 21:28:04 +0000
Ciaran McCreesh <ciaranm@×××××××.org> wrote:

> I think it's more that you're expected to justify *why* the bash
> requirement is so bad, given the cost of changing.

1) Lack of choice.
Gentoo is all about giving the user choice. baselayout even supports
other init systems when requested.

2) Speed.
Bash is one of the slowest shells around for looping.
However, it also requires less forking due to it's nice built-ins. This
does of course only work with bash and not other shells.

3) What's the cost of *not* changing away from bash?
I would say that bash is the best shell around in terms of features and
ease of use, however that is not without cost. That cost is new bash
versions consistently breaking baselayout, ebuilds and configure files.

4) Size.
Because bash has all these nice features it's large, hence unsuitable
for low memory or low disk space environments.

5) I'm *just* talking about config files here.
If users want to run bash, that's fine and I won't stop them. They can
also use bash in their init script if they so wish as I plan to support
something like so

depend() {
   shell bash
}

And voila, problem solved. Of course, that's just an idea I just had.
However, I also think that baselayout provided services should not
require bash for the above reasons, hence the need for a new config.

Hopefully I've justified this enough :)

Thanks

Roy
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