> nash, in particular, is quite an important part of this particular > distribution. Debian does not use nash nor does Fencepost have > NetworkManager for obvious reasons. > > These reasons are not obvious to me. Could you tell me what they are?
A nash manual page (http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/linuxcommand.org/man_pages/nash8.html) describes it as follows: nash is a very simple script interpretor designed to be as small as possible. It is primarily designed to run simple linuxrc scripts on an initrd image. Arguments to commands may be enclosed in either single or double quotes to allow spaces to be included in the arguments. Spaces outside of quotations always delineate arguments, and so backslash escaping is supported. It was (and probably is) used by Fedora and its derivatives (eg., Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS) as part of the boot sequence. Other distributions might be using it or something else. So if Debian is not using nash, then Fencepost may not have libnl which nash pulls in these days. NetworkManager is targetted for desktop and laptop users, not servers. So one can expect a XO from the OLPC to have it, or a default install of GNOME (possibly KDE too) to have it, but not a shell server, like Fencepost, to have it.
