Comment 63 for bug 61463

I believe that FAR less dashisms will creep in than bashisms have over
time. Just like switching web browsers... A developer who switches
from IE to Firefox has to give up all his IE-isms. He might pick up a
couple of Firefox-isms, but I am almost certain that there will be
less of them and they will be less problematic.

The solution to dashisms is to report them as bugs. Just like you did
for bashisms in the past (you did, right?).

dash *IS* Unix-2003-compliant (on this issue at least). If you read a
couple lines farther down, -n is not an option, it is an operand:
"A string to be written to standard output. If the first operand is
-n, or if any of the operands contain a backslash ( '\' ) character,
the results are implementation-defined."

If every person who has posted to this bug report so far instead took
the time to submit a patch to one bashism-laden project, this would be
a non-problem.

On 2/17/07, Martin Buchholz <email address hidden> wrote:
> "dash" cannot claim to be taking the moral high ground here,
> since dash's builtin echo is also not Unix-2003-compliant.
>
> According to
> http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/echo.html
> "Implementations shall not support any options."
> but dash's echo supports the (historic BSD) -n option.
<
> If Ubuntu persists in its present course of using dash as /bin/sh,
> there will be no way to have future reliable Ubuntu LTS
> versions, since dashisms will creep in. Users will
> merely have the choice of different sets of bugs, depending on
> whether they choose /bin/sh to point to /bin/bash or /bin/dash.