Busybox build problem

[Denis Vlasenko]

On Sunday 18 February 2007 16:40, Paul Smith wrote:
> 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.

bash is not a reason why bootup is slow. For desktop machine,
bash is small enough (700kb IIRC) to not matter.

Bootup is slow because of SysV init scripts. I ditched them,
and my boot is fast enough for me ever since.

> They are not 
> compromising and they are forcing packages to clean up their sloppy
> shell programming, and make /bin/sh scripts conform to POSIX.

Standards are not gods, they are just codified practice.
What is so terribly wrong with "function" syntax?

> > 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.

Wow, you read makefiles and supporting shell script machinery
of every package you build? Must be terribly time consuming task...
--
vda