From: brabuhr@... Date: 2008-08-12T22:06:34+09:00 Subject: Re: Sigh! I'm depressed. Debian vs Ruby and the backtick and subshells On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 8:54 AM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote: > On Tue, 2008-08-12 at 14:48 +0900, John Carter wrote: >> Then somebody threw some money at the Debian foundation to make Debian >> boot faster. > > Why does Debian use dash? I've never even *heard* of dash until I saw > this thread! Is there some religious war against bash? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_Almquist_shell "Dash, like ash, executes scripts faster than bash and depends on fewer libraries. It is believed to be more reliable in case of upgrade problems or disk failures." https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DashAsBinSh "The major reason to switch the default shell was efficiency. bash is an excellent full-featured shell appropriate for interactive use; indeed, it is still the default login shell. However, it is rather large and slow to start up and operate by comparison with dash. A large number of shell instances are started as part of the Ubuntu boot process. Rather than change each of them individually to run explicitly under /bin/dash, a change which would require significant ongoing maintenance and which would be liable to regress if not paid close attention, the Ubuntu core development team felt that it was best simply to change the default shell."