Re: Shell scripts requiring bash

[David Miller <davem at davemloft dot net>]

From: Thomas Schwinge <thomas@codesourcery.com>
Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2012 21:11:06 +0100

> With /bin/sh being dash, the following compares a pristine run to one
> with SHELL=/bin/bash passed.

These are all DASH bugs which have subsequently been fixed.

The only one you should still see on a debian system is a failure of
tst-cancel7{,x} in the NPTL tests.  That's due to dash bug which is
fixed in the upstream dash sources but hasn't propagated into debian
yet.  The dash in debian testing has all the other bugs fixed.

I just simply build dash from upstream source with "--disable-lineno"
and use that.  And that makes all the remaining libc test failures
go away.

All the real uses of bash specific features have been fixed by myself
and others over the years.  I do all of my libc development using a
machine that has dash as /bin/sh so I will notice and fix any new
issues that crop up.

All of our scripts in the libc tree should be POSIX shell scripts and
therefore there is no reason to require BASH explicitly anywhere.