Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: openrc portage news item

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Thu, Apr 14, 2011 at 4:09 AM, Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net> wrote:
> FWIW/IMHO, I don't believe the news item needs mentioning that it was bash
> that made it slow and inflexible.  Most users don't so much care whether
> it's C or bash or java that made it so, only that it was.

If this were Ubuntu I'd be inclined to agree.  However, I think that
most Gentoo users would be interested.  Maybe I have a different
perspective because I just gave a talk on booting two nights ago at an
LUG, but I wasn't even the one to bring up the shortcomings of bash in
the typical linux SysVInit-based service scripts.  Various approaches
that were discussed included symlinking /bin/sh to dash instead of
bash, and C-based solutions (or a combination of both).  It was
interesting to hear that at least a few other distros struggle with
bashisms in their init scripts, but no so much due to licensing/BSD
issues but because of a desire to use dash which does not support all
bashisms.

No need to go into gory details, but mentioning that it is C-based
instead of bash-based seems reasonable.  Granted, we're not really
getting rid of one of the problems with bash, which isn't just
/sbin/rc but rather it includes the init scripts themselves (every one
of which requires spawning a new bash, and many spawn additional
processes like sed/awk/etc).

Rich