Mail Archives: cygwin/2009/03/04/13:52:34
Akakima <akakima33 <at> gmail.com> writes:
>
> I would like to see dash (a POSIX-compliant implementation of sh) to
Not quite POSIX-compliant yet; dash lacks support for LINENO, which is a HUGE
drawback for what autoconf expects (basically, configure scripts generated by
autoconf first attempt to find a shell that supports POSIX-mandated LINENO,
because otherwise it has to run sed to fake LINENO and then re-exec itself,
which eats precious time). But other than that, you are correct that dash is
generally a decent shell, and in many cases faster than bash (it uses some nice
optimizations to avoid forks).
> be distributed with Cygwin. I am also willing to become the official
> maintainer if no one else want to do the job.
Yes, a port of dash would be welcome.
> I have done some minimal testing. dash can run its own configure script. In
> order to be sure that dash.exe was the only shell use by cygwin, i copied
> dash.exe over sh.exe and bash.exe.
Are you sure dash was used? Like I said, configure scripts generated by
autoconf prefer a shell that supports LINENO, and that means you might have
ended up with zsh or pdksh doing the work instead of dash. To guarantee you
used dash, you can use:
CONFIG_SHELL=path/to/dash path/to/dash ./configure
>
> I have read somewhere that dash becamed recently the official shell of
> Ubuntu.
I'm not ready to change the default /bin/sh; I think we'd still like to
keep /bin/sh as bash for the time being. But that doesn't stop users from
installing dash instead of bash as /bin/sh. And I would particularly welcome a
pre-built dash, as I already test with it as part of maintaining upstream
autoconf.
--
Eric Blake
volunteer cygwin bash maintainer, upstream autoconf maintainer
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