Comment 41 for bug 61463

It seems that there are two sides to this very interesting debate. I'm going to reiterate a few things that have been said in the verbage above.

Bash is almost posix compliant, but will little eccentricties like options to echo functioning differently - which bash seems to be quite innocent of - as noted, the ''correct'' behaviour was only mandated in the posix spec in '04. And a few more esoteric things. Echo is my major concern, and seems to have caused the most breakage.

We have a refusal to acknowledge that breaking software is a bad thing from the developers who have admin access.

As noted, if a script needs to be fast, #!/bin/dash can be used. Boot scripts should probably do that instead of relying on #!/bin/sh. Why aren't they doing this already?

A quick summary of reported problematic pieces of software, so you don't have to trawl through the above (please comment if I miss anything):
 - limewire
 - intel compiler
 - cedega
 - glibc makefiles (!?)
 - autoconf (?)
 - vmware
 - mathematica
 - nx server

I have an honest question. Do the ubuntu pbuilder machines have /bin/sh as bash or dash? How are we building packages if autotools and makefiles are breaking?