rcrsn51 wrote:I have given this some thought and decided the following: the most fail-safe way to run a gtkdialog app in a non-bash environment is to entirely remove the bashisms, not create an alternate method of running those bashisms.
No problem, anything you want to do with your own apps is fine and of no concern to me.
However i find your statement both entirely misleading to others (to the point of being false) and an attack on my work with gtkwialog. Bash was designed as a more powerful programmer's shell and it is no less safe to use than a simpler, less full-featured, shell such as original /bin/sh. As a longtime C programmer, in a professional capacity, I am well aware of what is 'safe' or not.
Your choice of wording (particulary the use of the term 'bashisms') imply that using gtkwialog via bash is somehow inherently less safe than using a program written in a simpler shell language - that is patently untrue.
"Bashisms" simply mean code written using the more powerful features of bash, which in no way makes a program prone to failure whether the shell used by the main system is some other shell or not - the problem was that legacy gtkdialog inflexibly forces commands to use /bin/sh, which certainly rendered its bash driven code failure prone. Gtkwialog, on the other hand, has no such restriction and can be safely used with bash scripts (including the powerful extended features bash offers the programmer) - no matter what the system shell is.
Obviously a poor programmer could render a program useless if they used bash code along with gtkwialog and then ran it through /bin/sh, but that is just poor coding and another matter altogether.
The term 'bashism' was simply invented to warn against writing a system script in bash if the user wanted to run that code via /bin/sh. Writing a user application, rather than a system script, could be done in any level of programming language be it bash, C, python, lua, whatever - none of these are more failure prone than ash or dash. Bashism isn't a religion either, despite the way some people use the word so misleadingly. Of course you can't run a bash program using ash or dash as the interpreter; gtkwialog doesn't force that situation on anyone.
EDIT:
I am very disappointed in your negative attitude, in which you purposively rewrite one program to discourage simple conversion of all, but that attitude can at least be disregarded. Your programs are easily, simply, and quickly converted to run perfectly well with gtkwialog as it happens, with perfect safety in the result - no re-write to Posix ever was necessary at all; but do what you like - some of us don't have time to rewrite programs with less powerful shell language. Nothing wrong with writing new programs using ash or dash or bash for that matter (or converting to Posix if so desired) - depends how much functionality a programmer wants from the coding language they use. Totally rubbish to suggest bash (or bash with gtkwialog) is somehow unsafe though. Comments like yours simply amount to conservative jealously against development progress you clearly see as a threat to yourself, which is a shame to others in the community who have to suffer as a result of such code-protectionism. This is open-source code so yes of course your code and mine and everyone elses could be forked if not satisfying some need. Having said that, I have no personal interest in your code - aside from Peasywifi, which works well for me in practice - but it is not essential to me either.
wiak