Comment 2 for bug 141481

I did not bring up POSIX compliance purposefully -I invite you to look at the links I provided to other bugs, which I feel discuss the POSIX compliance of dash adequately. The summary is that dash claims POSIX complainance, which is why dash is not fixed and continues to break valid scripts. I am not aware of any non-POSIXness in the examples above!

But that is neither here nor there- by always bringing up the POSIX strictness bit we're breaking with that time-honoured general rule: be lenient in what you accept conservative with what you generate. If this is a non-bug for ubuntu developers then it effectively becomes Everybody Else's Problem, - users and developers alike - as ubuntu is an otherwise excellent distribution which is really catching on with the general public.

Writing portable shell scripts is an art in itself. You cannot write a portable script by reading and knowing the POSIX sh standard. Much akin to writing browser-compatible websites, it requires you to know about all the specific issues that may arise in specific software, which again requires extensive first-hand experience. Dash introduces *new* quirkyness and *new* parsing issues that no other POSIX shell has troubles with, and does this in the name of POSIX compliance.