[PATCH] make it possible to keep Config/Kbuild snippets in *.c files

[Rob Landley]

On Saturday 15 May 2010 14:28:11 Cristian Ionescu-Idbohrn wrote:
> On Sat, 15 May 2010, Denys Vlasenko wrote:
> > On Saturday 15 May 2010 19:57, Cristian Ionescu-Idbohrn wrote:
> > > On Sat, 15 May 2010, Denys Vlasenko wrote:
> > > > They are not bash compat :)
> > >
> > > Pick any one shell as _the_ reference shell and compare it with all
> > > other major shells.  The in"compat"ibilities (bash or not bash) will
> > > be noticable.
> >
> > But bash is de-facto standard Linux shell.
>
> Was.  Things change.  Several distributions made the choice to replace
> bash with dash.  I was not involved in that process.  I'll have to live
> with it.  Mind you, I don't necessarily think it's a bad decision.

For a definition of "several" meaning "one did it, and one is considering it".

None of them removed bash from their base install.  They bloated the system by 
adding added another shell.  The reasons they did so are documented here, and 
are really stupid:

  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DashAsBinSh

Their boot scripts were running too slowly, so instead of A) fixing their boot 
scripts to not be horribly bloated, B) changing their boot scripts to say 
#!/bin/dash instead of #!/bin/sh, they instead changed #!/bin/sh to point to a 
shell that (at the time) didn't even _WORK_, and which broke hundreds of 
package builds (including the Linux kernel).  And don't get me started abouut 
the way it was used as the default LOGIN shell for new users back when it 
DIDN'T HAVE LINE EDITING SUPPORT.  (They reverted that, /bin/bash is now the 
default login shell.)

Then they A) created upstart and B) ported a lot of the boot logic from 
scripts to C, rendering their original reason for introducing dash completely 
moot.  But they can't admit a mistake.  I've gotten Ubuntu engineers to admit 
in _person_ that it was a horrible mistake, but Cannonical spent a lot of 
political capital shoved this down people's throats and they are resolutely 
not looking back.

The reason debian is copying Ubuntu is that Ubuntu has both more users and 
more developers than Debian does, and the tail is very definitely wagging the 
dog there.  Debian is chasing Ubuntu's tail so as not to be rendered 
completely irrelevant.  (Again.)  And if that means swallowing questionable 
technical decisions, so be it.

> > Not ksh or zsh.
>
> True.  Still, dash came along to become the default shell.

The default of who?  Fedora?  SuSE?  Gentoo?

> And the
> busybox build scripts are now broken.  And that makes a lot of people
> unhappy.

1) Explicitly saying #!/bin/bash fixes that.

2) As with the distros, "A lot of people" would apparently be "you" in this 
instance.

Rob
-- 
Latency is more important than throughput. It's that simple. - Linus Torvalds