[PLUG] Advisability of changing shell redirect

[Scott Garman]

On 04/28/2010 11:11 AM, Tim Wescott wrote:
> tim at servo:~/Downloads$ ./arm-2009q3-67-arm-none-linux-gnueabi.bin
> The installer has detected that your system uses the dash shell
> as /bin/sh.  This shell is not supported by the installer.
> You can work around this problem by changing /bin/sh to be a
> symbolic link to a supported shell such as bash.
> For example, on Ubuntu systems, execute this shell command:
>     % sudo dpkg-reconfigure -plow dash
>     Install as /bin/sh? No
> Please refer to the Getting Started guide for more information,
> or contact CodeSourcery Support for assistance.
> tim at servo:~/Downloads$
>
> Do I want to touch this?  Is this going to screw up _other_ software
> that may be looking for 'sh' to be a Dash shell command?  Or am I fairly
> safe playing with it?

FWIW, OpenEmbedded and Poky also require this change. I believe it is 
done because they support building thousands of packages, and there are 
many of them out there that expect /bin/sh to support bash extensions.

I have not yet run into any cases yet where a shell script breaks 
because /bin/sh is bash instead of dash.

> And do I want to just change the link manually, or do I want to use
> dpgk-reconfigure as they suggest?

Definitely use dpkg-reconfigure. This will ensure that package updates 
don't end up reverting the change.

Scott