because the topic of shells for the build system came up on IRC: in [1] it is claimed that dash is faster, that could be relevant to us given how we spawn boatloads of shells: "The boot speed improvements in Ubuntu 6.10 were often incorrectly attributed to Upstart ... These improvements were in fact largely due to the changed /bin/sh."
also man bash says: > BUGS > It's too big and too slow. following numbers are from my Fedora 17 system, with the toy attachment that spawns 100k shells running "true" (only one run each): > [0] ms@bastet:~ > SHELL=/bin/bash time ./a.out > /bin/bash > 92.95user 113.48system 3:45.26elapsed 91%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata > 1276maxresident)k > 0inputs+0outputs (0major+37438873minor)pagefaults 0swaps > [0] ms@bastet:~ > ls -l /bin/sh > lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 4 5. Aug 23:25 /bin/sh -> bash > [0] ms@bastet:~ > SHELL=/bin/sh time ./a.out > /bin/sh > 93.47user 112.89system 3:45.37elapsed 91%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata > 1276maxresident)k > 0inputs+0outputs (0major+37338986minor)pagefaults 0swaps > [0] ms@bastet:~ > SHELL=/bin/dash time ./a.out > /bin/dash > 1.11user 9.06system 1:34.89elapsed 10%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 608maxresident)k > 0inputs+0outputs (0major+19148968minor)pagefaults 0swaps because i couldn't believe the difference i thought perhaps my .bashrc makes it much slower so i've cleared it and logged in via ssh, which makes it not that much faster: > -bash-4.2$ SHELL=/bin/sh time ./a.out > /bin/sh > 85.96user 110.53system 3:38.24elapsed 90%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata > 1264maxresident)k > 0inputs+0outputs (0major+37067614minor)pagefaults 0swaps so clearly there is a measurable benefit to using /bin/dash as shell. considering the above i'd like the build system to continue to support non-bash shells and also it would be great to have a tinderbox using non-bash /bin/sh to build in order to detect breakage (this does not require a new tinderbox, at least for Fedora there is a "dash" package, it would just require symlinking /bin/sh to it). on a related note it would also be great to have a tinderbox with GNU make 3.81, because (on non-windows platforms) that is supposed to work but breaks from time to time because only Debian still ships it by default AFAIK. [1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DashAsBinSh _______________________________________________ LibreOffice mailing list LibreOffice@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice