I gave in and installed bash from Homebrew.

This is what I do, and just so others know:

Realize that if your personal account's shell is pointed into the homebrew installation in /usr/local, and you implode homebrew or wipe /usr/local, you won't be able to start a terminal until your shell is changed or the binary exists. Solving this without Terminal.app being able to launch is a minor annoyance.

Right, so have Terminal run this instead:

  #!/bin/sh
  
  for shell in \
    /opt/local/bin/bash \
    /bin/bash \
    /bin/sh
  do
    [ -x "$shell" ] && exec "$shell" -l
  done
  
  echo >&2 "ERROR: No valid shell found!"
  read -r -s -n 1 -t 10 dummy
  exit 1

If you are able to run a script with #!/bin/sh, and /bin/sh becomes un-executable during the execution of your script, you're definitely having a bad time. :D

That is a very good point, thank you

The proof of this is trivial, and left to the reader.

Having a, "Holy shit, why didn't I think of that?" moment over here. Thanks for the tip!

So weird, I literally updated bash minutes before seeing this post about bash. I followed these instructions to enable it as default https://johndjameson.com/blog/updating-your-shell-with-homeb...

Same here. Wish I had done it sooner.

I found an "article" that explains this a bit [0], the gist is that the App Store is the sticking point. But why would this be the case? What does bash have to do with the App Store app? And why are they still allowed to distribute 3.2?

[0] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-reason-for-some-of-the-Lin...

Bash 3.2 is distributed under GPL Version 2. Bash 4 is under GPL version 3. (I'll let others discuss the differences and how they might interact with the App Store.)

That doesn't make any sense, App Store has no relation to what Apple distributes as part of macOS.

Apple takes issue with patents-related wording in GPL3 and doesn't want to be subject to GPL3 (while they're OK with GPL2). Hence not distributing GPL3-licensed software.

FWIW fish is great. My only complaint is that you can't use the `ENV_VAR=value` syntax available in bash, but you really just need to prefix with `env`.