coreutils instructions

[Bruce Dubbs]

Dan Nicholson wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 11:15 AM, Bruce Dubbs <bruce.dubbs at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Dan Nicholson wrote:
>> 
>>> A while back I sanitized the bootscripts for POSIX sh compatibility, and
>>> I think DJ has been maintaining that goal. I think it's a nice (and
>>> obtainable) goal to target since having sh != bash can save on bloat.
>> Save on bloat?  For what?  My copy of bash is 500K.  dash is about 80K.
> 
> Right, bash is 4 times the size of dash. That adds up when you're forking the
> shell a hundred times or whatever during boot.

Come on Dan.  You know better than that.  When you fork a program, the code
segment is not duplicated, but only any necessary data.  For that, there would 
be no significant difference between bash and dash.

> The last time I tested, it shaved like 4 seconds off boot using dash instead
> of bash.
> 
> http://linuxfromscratch.org/pipermail/lfs-support/2008-February/034192.html

> I use bash all the time and I wouldn't consider using a minimal posix shell
> for my login shell. For any non-trivial script, I use bash. However, for a
> generic shell script, I don't know why you couldn't make it posix compliant.
> That allows people to have flexibility without much loss. The bootscripts are
> pretty simple.

As you mention, bootscripts are pretty simple and in no way are a stress test. 
Four seconds doesn't seem very significant to me.  It's not enough to notice 
unless you are doing a timing test.

   -- Bruce