No brace expansion for ash?

[Denys Vlasenko]

On Monday 11 July 2011 10:35, Chris Rees wrote:
> Denys,
> 
> I'd like to start by assuring you that I have a great amount of
> respect for the work you put in to a highly important piece of
> software, and would like to thank you for your positive responses in
> helping to improve its portability.
> 
> On 11 July 2011 01:50, Denys Vlasenko <vda.linux at googlemail.com> wrote:
> > On Sunday 10 July 2011 21:02, Chris Rees wrote:
> >> Of course it's up to the Busybox project to set your own policy -- my
> >> problem with adding non-standard features to shells is that people
> >> rely on them and write incompatible scripts when *all that is needed*
> >> is to just use the correct language in the first place.
> >
> > Bash was used in Linux from the very beginning, which makes it a de-facto
> > standard. It doesn't matter whether you or me like it or not, we must
> > account for the fact that long-time Linux users are used to it.
> > Forcing them to stop using all bashisms is both counter-productive
> > and arrogant.
> 
> I find it unfair for you to call me arrogant when you are asserting
> that everyone else should bow to Linux pressure and allow nonstandard
> 'extensions'.
> 
> What about the large numbers of people who struggle with breakage
> because of the 'arrogant' people who write bash scripts and put it
> into autoconf scripts? Or, worse assume that [ "$1" == "$2" ] is valid
> [1]? Or using find with no directory arguments?

I think you are right in a sense that bash shouldn't have introduced
gratuitous extensions, such as ==, "function" keyword etc.
Perhaps echo builtin should have been implemented differently too.

But it was many years ago. We can't go back in time and fix _that_.
What we can do is to not repeat the same mistake of _again_
breaking compatibility.

-- 
vda