Rewrite all bash-specific code to be POSIX shell compatible about toybox HOT 7 CLOSED

The toybox shell is intended to be a reasonable bash replacement, so rather than remove bashisms from our shell code the plan is to implement support in toysh. That hasn't been done yet, but modifying toybox's shell code to run in something other than toysh seems counterproductive. Rob

So you want me to add enough bashisms until removing them is _not_ trivial, in order to justify what I already told you I'm going to do anyway? Seems like a lot of effort, but if you really think it's necessary... Rob

Toybox should build under itself (which is regression tested using the "make install_airlock" target), so it eventually builds under android. In theory generated/build.sh is supposed to contain a build script for building it (without make) against a snapshot "generated" directory. The main "toybox is ready for its 1.0 release" goal is for toybox to provide all the tools that aren't set in "TOOLCHAIN=" in scripts/install.sh which are needed to build https://github.com/landley/mkroot and then build Linux From Scratch under that. I have a todo item to provide a directory under scripts/ with a snapshot of generated files and build.sh for a minimal build of just the host tools needed to build toybox, so it can build its own tools and then build a full version with those tools on systems like macosx where the sed doesn't work. (In the meantime, it uses gsed if it's installed. I can add toysh to this, although the build would then need to "./sh script.sh" to bypass the #!/bin/bash at the top.) But that's pretty far down the todo list, and ensuring that the generated files are sufficiently portable (the .config options for host library features, the -lutil and similar link options) without build-time probing of the environment is nontrivial. In the meantime, no. I do not intend to remove the bashisms from the build. I may add more if sufficiently poked about it. Bash was not only the standard shell of Linux for 15 years, it was the first program Linux ever _ran_. I wrote about that at some length in http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2015-January/003831.html I also note that github is the wrong place to raise this sort of issue: the project's mailing list is where design decisions and discussions occur. I only use github to publish the git repository, the project has a mailing list for development discussion. The argument put forward for "not bash" has been ideological purity not "I couldn't get it to work". Toybox has never used posix as more than a frame of reference: they standardized pax instead of tar, removed cpio after susv2 despite initramfs requiring it, don't have a "mount" command... See the roadmap's posix section for more. Also, this month I'm in tokyo for work and kind of swamped, so probably wouldn't do anything about it before flying back to the states on the 5th anyway. Rob