> One thing about this which strikes me as a bit ironic is debian's use of
> the dash shell, made to be POSIX-compliant, and so causing endless
> problems for scripts using bash's additional non-POSIX functionality,
> but not specifying bash explicitly in the shebang line.

Hmm - that might require some background: I'd venture that
most of these scripts were written when sh was just a symlink
to bash, and dash didn't exist, nevermind as a debian
package.

The word decree is too strong, but at some point debian
system scripts were supposed to be written to be /bin/dash
compatible, but instead of changing all existing system scripts
to start with /bin/bash, and only replacing them
with /bin/sh once full checked/rewritten, they were kept
at /bin/sh as people hoped for the best - a quick win.

I, for one, never bought into the reasoning for migrating
system scripts away from bash to sh. The argument that
bash is too large struck me as odd - there were critical
dependencies on perl and python with a much larger dependency
graph, and much bigger startup costs...

More importantly I think it is good that one uses the same language
that one types into the terminal every day when extending the
distribution - that makes a sysadmin equal to the distribution maintainer,
instead of specialising that into a different caste...

regards

marc