I agree with Mark Constable's comment above. In sparr's view of the world, all software is actively maintained by individuals who are deeply committed to free software (and especialy the Ubuntu distribution), and to pedantic adherence to standards.
In the real world.... let's look at my own software, Sun Java. Every Makefile command is implicitly an invocation of /bin/sh. There are on the order of 1000 "shell scripts" in Sun Java Makefiles that invoke "echo -e" through use of a Makefile macro. Some engineer would have to audit all of those uses to make sure that those uses are safe with plain "echo" or convert them to use printf(1). Since the Makefiles belong to different components, many separate component owners need to review and approve such a change. This is the kind of change that engineers have a really hard time getting excited about. I might be masochistic enough to take this on, but in most corporate organizations such an unpalatable task will simply be left undone, unless Ubuntu compatibility suddenly becomes a high-visibility management issue. On the other extreme, many projects are left in a dormant state for many years. I remember gzip going without any releases for a decade. Even an organization like the FSF is not going to make all their software "Ubuntu-compatible" any time soon. Ubuntu's change to dash sends the message "We don't care about serious users." Corporations are likely to respond in kind: "We don't support hobbyist OSes with a history of making recklessly incompatible changes every release." which will make Ubuntu less useful for everyone. As others have pointed out, you can speed up bootup by making /bin/dash a required component and using /bin/dash explicitly in the startup scripts. -- Script that are using bash could be broken with the new symlink https://launchpad.net/bugs/61463 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
