Proposal: Use standard sh instead of bash for quality Unix shell scripts about foundation HOT 4 CLOSED

My thoughts:

I ran FreeBSD as my primary server operating system for a couple of years ~6 years ago, until I had to give it up due to hardware incompatibility.

The unnecessary use of Linux-isms in theoretically easily POSIX-portable utilities was incredibly frustrating, so I really empathize.

However, I've also had a number of cases where working with vanilla sh is pure hell. Most of the time, though, bash and sh inter-operate great and there is no reason to dive fully into bash.

There's also a complication that some dotnet projects, like Roslyn, currently don't support building on FreeBSD and doing so isn't on the roadmap, so supporting a new platform is a new goal.

So here's what makes sense to me: all scripts that can easily use sh instead of bash should change their shebang line to do so. This should be accepted as PRs, but not driven by the project maintainers themselves, as many of the projects don't promise explicit BSD support.

If we come across something which is necessary, currently done in bash, and hard to do in vanilla sh -- tough luck. No one uses or knows tcsh and it's just a step backwards. There are now many minimal bash-compatible shells, like dash, that are extremely lightweight and installing one of them should not be large burden. Most dotnet repos already have external dependencies and adding one for bash doesn't seem ridiculous to me.

from foundation.

Thanks for your feedback @agocke.

In general, choosing sh over bash if possible is considered an improvement and as I have understood, your point is it is not a major improvement (as even on FreeBSD 10.2, although the default shell is csh, bash can be installed in parallel pretty easily).

Regarding building dotnet projects on FreeBSD:

• I was able to build Roslyn on FreeBSD last month: dotnet/roslyn#2844 (comment).
• CoreCLR already builds and FreeBSD bins are distributed via dnu.
• Here is a guide written yesterday (as part of https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/issues/1633) for building CroreFX on FreeBSD 10.2: https://gist.github.com/jasonwilliams200OK/6efa7907e66275df2d24.

from foundation.

Seconding @agocke proposal. Having bash as a dependency isn't really that troublesome, as long as the shebang used managed to resolve it correctly (i.e., not /bin/bash).

I assume FreeBSD support is not on the road-map for most dotnet/aspnet projects, but if we can make them more FreeBSD-friendly with near zero-cost PRs, maybe some day later, when we get closer to where we want to be, bigger changes can be warranted too and policies can be reconsidered.

Rome wasn't built in a day and all that yadda yadda. :)

from foundation.

I'm going to go ahead and close this issue on this repo. We should open issues where there are problematic scripts in the repo's that have them. That is where the work in each repo is tracked and where fixes can be made.

from foundation.