Busybox build problem

[Paul Smith]

On Sun, 2007-02-18 at 12:03 +0100, Denis Vlasenko wrote:

> > I'd prefer people stop using bash specific things,
> 
> It's too late. Face the reality. bash installed base is too big.

I disagree; major distributions such as Ubuntu are right now ditching
bash as /bin/sh, for other shells like dash and ash: they are doing this
to try to get more efficiency and speed during bootup etc.  They are not
compromising and they are forcing packages to clean up their sloppy
shell programming, and make /bin/sh scripts conform to POSIX.

> How you realistically imagine everyone starting to audit all their
> scripts for usage of "function"? How many man-years will it take?
> Then compare it to the effort required to add support for this feature
> to dash.

That, of course, is up to you.  However, I will point out that I can
count on the fingers of one hand (with some left over) the number of
package shell scripts I've ever seen that use "function".  And I've been
building free software since the 1980's.

I've seen lots scripts that are written to require bash, don't get me
wrong.  But for all different sorts of reasons and "function" is not a
common one, in my experience.

YMMV...