Ubuntu Edgy: the wrong priorities

fragglet has already posted about this, but given that I pointed him to the bug, and given that it's being NOTABUG'd by the wonders of Open Source, I'm going to see if I can spread it around just a little more. Come on, blogosphere---do your Web 2.0 thing. (Hey, new pictures of kittens on flickr! Cool!)

/bin/sh in Ubuntu Edgy Eft does not give you GNU Bash. In theory, this is perfectly acceptable—/bin/sh is only guaranteed to be some POSIX-compatable shell. In reality, however, Linux® users expect GNU Bash, and this means that there are myriad shell scripts out there which incorrectly assume either that #!/bin/sh will get them Bash, or that they're only using POSIX features when they've actually accidentally slipped in a Bash-ism. (Oh, wouldn't it have been nice of Bash to only allow sh features when run as sh. Alas, too late.)

The bugs are in the scripts. I don't debate this. The problem is, this change (to dash, if you're wondering) has caused things to break. It's amazing how little users care to any real depth about whose fault it is when something they're trying to get done breaks. (Suspend is completely shafted on my laptop at the moment. I could be the ACPI module; it could be the kernel itself; it could be some GNOME power management thing; it could be some other module not cleanly stopping/resuming, or getting the hardware in a pickle—I don't care. I don't have the time or knowledge of that area of the system to investigate properly. I just want it to work, and it doesn't, so I swear at Ubuntu as a whole under my breath and deal with having to shut down every time I put my laptop in my bag.) Things that work in Dapper, Fedora, Gentoo and so on will not in Edgy, and people will blame Ubuntu. They are not unreasonable to do so, because their lives are too short to learn what shells are, let alone about the differences between them. They just wanted to install something manually, or follow some instructions on a wiki, or any of the myriad things that people follow by rote (a search for "dash" in Edgy's bug list used to provide several examples, but they seem to have shunted them off as dash bugs, which is even more hilariously wrong), and they're getting all these errors in the bit with the terminal.

(Hell, even if you're a veritable UN*X-head, you're still potentially screwed the first time. You won't get any clear indication that you're using dash until/unless you think to look at where /bin/sh actually points. Shell scripts just start throwing errors (or worse, if it's a semantic, not syntactic, Bash/Dash difference), and it's up to your investigative powers to either work out of find out that it's due to incorrect expectations of bash/self-POSIX-ness.)

The bottom line is that this decision, for the sake of pedantry and a tiny speed increase (seriously, if the overhead of Bash over Dash is making you lose sleep, you may want to leave the wonderfully baroque world of shell scripting entirely, and replace the damn things with real programmes), has made Ubuntu Edgy randomly break some things for some people. For a distro which has had such a strong Just Work™ approach to stuff, why is this the right thing for it to be doing? I'd expect this from, I don't know, Gentoo. (Using a copy of dash compiled at -O11, of course. And they'd change it to some other shell the week after, ad infinitum.)

Right. So. It's the Wrong Thing™. It's been causing bugs, and there's even a meta-bug–type-thing (61463) in Launchpad. What do the Ubuntu developers do?

Close the bug as a rejected wishlist item, because there are "no plans to change the default [shell] back to bash".

This is the path of beaurocracy and standards-pedantry over actual usefulness to the human beings which Ubuntu proclaims to be for. Am I getting excessively worked up over a shell? Not particularly: I'm getting disturbed by the whiff of a trend in this direction, and it doesn't exactly reassure me to hear that Debian developers—bastions of idealism over a system you can actually use—have been jumping project to Ubuntu. If you smell that too, kick up a stink.