Re: dash dash?

[Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>]

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On 08/06/2010 07:21 AM, Nellis, Kenneth wrote:
> Attempting to do some housecleaning and uninstall packages
> I no longer use,  I attempted to uninstall dash, but Setup 
> informs me that it is required by rebase. Wouldn't bash or 
> the Bourne shell be a more appropriate choice? Sure,  dash
> is smaller than either,  but efficiency isn't critical for
> an application such as rebase.

rebaseall (which is a wrapper around rebase) _cannot_ rebase an in-use
.dll.  Dash has fewer in-use dlls than bash.  Therefore, dash is the
(much) better choice for rebase.

By the way, the Bourne shell is pretty much obsolete.  On Solaris,
/bin/sh is still the Bourne shell, but on every other system, /bin/sh
aims to be POSIX-compatible (the historic Bourne shell does not comply
with POSIX).  And for portability reasons, you are better off writing a
POSIX-compatible script that can use /bin/sh rather than requiring
/bin/bash.

I'm also entertaining the notion of following Debian's lead and
switching /bin/sh to dash, since dash is noticeably faster than bash if
your script is POSIX-conforming.  Not very seriously yet, but it's not
out of the question.

> 
> I then ran "man dash" and found two places in the man page 
> that use the Unicode MATHEMATICAL LEFT/RIGHT ANGLE BRACKET 
> (U+27E8/27E9) symbols. These symbols probably don't render
> properly on most folk's systems, so IMHO are a poor choice 
> of symbols to use in a man page. In an example, it shows:
> 
>     lf foobar ⟨return⟩

Please report bugs in the dash man page upstream to the dash development
list.

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake@redhat.com    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org


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