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Posts: 915 | Thanked: 3,209 times | Joined on Jan 2011 @ Germany
#166
@Ken-Young:
While the N900 certainly has more than enough power to run bash (or any other shell), I think it's still a good idea to keep the default shell at a bare minimum, which means busybox.
Not everybody likes bash best. Some people prefer zsh, others like ksh and I even know people who voluntarily use csh (although I doubt their state of mind ).
One reason to not like bash is because it's GNU and if you're not careful, using it makes you create GNUisms in your code that won't be portable in terms of POSIX compliance.

As long as everybody is free to install his favourite shell I see no harm in shipping busybox as a default.
The reason why I installed bash in my ED images is because I do like bash and I don't mind the GNUisms. You should see this rather as a deviation from my usual approach of providing a minimal sane package base than as part of that minimalism (the same is true for vim btw.).
 

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