Comment 35 for bug 61463

Here is a nice illustration in support of arguments made in this discussion. I am a visitor, I tried Ubuntu to see whether it is worth while to consider switching to Ubuntu. I got stuck with (1) some simple scripts that use shell variable indirection and dont work in Ubuntu and (2) the vpnc library package not working in Ubuntu - I need vpnc to connect to my universities intranet.

I lost about 1/2 day to discover that sh is not sh and to figure out a work-around. And I lost nearly another 1/2 day to dig into bash manuals, Posix specifications, understanding the reasoning - and to discover the present discussion.

Lessons learned under the bottom line: (a) programmes dont run on Ubuntu that run on other distributions and (b) Ubuntu does not check whether their library packages run (reading this discussion: does not care?). I translate this - maybe too harshly put - to: unless you consider compliance to Posix as quality, Ubuntu lacks quality.

The speed argument is pure theory: how much time does an average application spend executing shell scripts, and what is the average time needed on a somewhat recent computer? And, system installation time on Ubuntu with Dash and on Mandriva without Dash is very comparable.

My conclusion: For a user who does not want to invest all that time (and has the skills to do it), but who wants to do "a little bit more than office applications" Ubuntu is not adequate.

A contribution to the technical part of this discsussion: I stumbled over the following shell constructs that run in Bash (and Sh) but not in Dash:

x=${!y} (indirection: read a variable whose name is the value of another one)

for ((i = 0 ; i < 3 ; i++ )) ; do
  ... snip ...
done
(a very simplified copy of code I extracted from the vpnc-script file from the vpn library package - vpnc-script lines 225 and on)