Making /bin/sh == bash. Has the time come?

[Shankar Unni]

Christopher Faylor wrote:

> So, in conversation with Corinna, I think that we're starting to lean
> towards making /bin/sh == bash sometime soon.

Excellent idea. And it even seems to handle the automatic switch to 
POSIX mode correctly when called "sh.exe".

Talking of which, how good is "pdksh" these days?

Using your "exec-expr-in-a-loop" microbenchmark (without the builtin), 
it seems to be nearly as fast as "ash" (within a few percent), and 
almost 1.5x as fast as bash (I got 20, 23 and 38 seconds for ash, pdksh 
and bash respectively). And for the "builtin" (using $((i+1))) loop, 
it's still nearly 4x as fast as bash (0.06 vs 0.23 seconds, or 0.25 vs 
1.1 seconds for 10000 iterations).

Is it stable enough (and well-enough maintained) to be considered for 
being "the shell"?

> We won't get rid of ash and will point to it when people
 > send the inevitable "Cygwin is slow!" message here.

Actually, has anyone done recent benchmarks comparing bash or pdksh vs 
ash on a reasonable-sized Configure script, or something like that 
(instead of toy benchmarks)?

My gut feeling is that we may not even need all the alternatives stuff, 
and can just tell folks who are *really anal* about this (or running 
especially feeble machine) to just run "SHELL=/bin/ash ash ./configure".


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