On June 17, 2020 7:27:29 PM UTC, Piscium via arch-general <arch-general@archlinux.org> wrote:
On Wed, 17 Jun 2020 at 20:19, Kusoneko <kusoneko@kusoneko.moe> wrote:
Pretty much this, to be honest. I don't really see the point of changing everyone's /bin/sh for one person's personal preference when there isn't really any point in doing so to begin with.
The reasons Ubuntu switched in 2006 and Debian in 2011 were speed, less bugs and more security. A simple benchmark I ran with several shells using konsole (which is one of the fastest terminals according to my simple benchmarks):
time ls -R /
• dash 8.45 • zsh 8.53 (1 % bigger) • bash 17.1 • fish 19.55
Times are in seconds, on my desktop that has a spinning drive. The first time it takes longer as the system caches stuff so the times above are after running a few times. I read that in some benchmarks dash is up to 4 times faster than bash.
Sure. I personally don't really have a dog in this fight, as I don't really do shell scripting and use zsh as my login shell in most cases, and bash otherwise, but someone has to play devil's advocate and point out the cost of changing something that is this widely establish across so many distros. Of course, as most things are made with Ubuntu as a baseline because it is supposedly the most user-friendly, I'd bet the issue I pointed out isn't widespread, but it is likely still there and needs to be pointed out.