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From: William Pitcock <nenolod@dereferenced.org>
Date: Sat, 10 Feb 2018 18:22:21 -0600
Message-ID: <CA+T2pCHLm3jOU1o4ZjV0yEb=5WPA2iedcx1YHPfeHOaxJ66oLw@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [alpine-user] apk(1) error does not go away
To: Laurent Bercot <ska-devel@skarnet.org>
Cc: "alpine-user@lists.alpinelinux.org" <alpine-user@lists.alpinelinux.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"

Hello,

On Sat, Feb 10, 2018 at 6:09 PM, Laurent Bercot <ska-devel@skarnet.org> wrote:
>
>> Oh, I see. So it's just because you don't like it. I thought there was
>> some system-wide limitation or something on Alpine.
>
>
>  It's not because someone doesn't like it. It's because it's an
> inferior technical choice, teaching you to use non-standard constructs
> in your scripts (reducing portability), consuming way more resources
> than is necessary, and proven insecure in the past. We care about
> quality of implementation, that's why we discourage you from using
> bash. There's nothing more to it.
>
>  Using bash makes sense in a few cases, namely when you need the extra
> functionality that bash offers over a POSIX shell: for instance, arrays.
> But those cases are pretty rare (and those bash scripts can generally
> be advantageously replaced with small programs in a real programming
> language - lua for instance). Most admin tasks can be achieved with
> a POSIX shell, so it's good practice to code for sh, not for bash or
> any other specific shell.
>
>  There's no system-wide limitation on Alpine, but bash is not in base;
> the default shell is ash, Busybox's /bin/sh, which is compatible with
> bash in many ways, but not 100%. If you want to run bash scripts, you
> need to apk add bash, which increases the size of your image.
>
>  Of course, you're free not to care about any of this. But attention
> to those details is generally why people choose Alpine over other
> distributions, so you should expect those arguments to be given on
> Alpine mailing-lists.

He shouldn't expect to be given unsolicited advice for using bash.  It
is off-topic (he wanted to know why his package manager broke) and
rude (because it is unsolicited).

William


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