There's a difference between manually logging in once a day and typing apt-get update && apt-get upgrade, seeing warnings, responding to them and applying and re-configuring/recompiling ports.

One can take five minutes. One can take an hour.

>On a workstation there are really no significant issues.

Yes, and on linux you can run testing. But I want more stability on a server.

> ZoL is fine, but support and integration still go Illumos > FreeBSD > ZoL. There are enough commercial products using FreeBSD ZFS that it is robust.

For some reason, all of a sudden everyone thinks that ZoL is legally safe to use. I'm not a lawyer, but whatever. The point is that it's still new and not tested significantly, but it should be more stable soon.

>UNIX uses the shell for a lot of things, interactive users are just one infrequent process. Bash is harmful as a non-interactive shell. Change your interactive shell to bash or zsh, problem solved.

So write shell scripts against /bin/sh or dash.

>Bash is harmful as a non-interactive shell.

How is it harmful? I mean why are your putting your shell in an untrusted environment?

Moreover, I understand if you like sh, tcsh, zsh or bash. My point is that it seems to me more of a "we always used tcsh/sh, so that's how it will stay forever" rather than "let's see what's the best default shell now and use it".

And why can't both shells (or zsh, which is MIT licensed) be included in base?

That reason is because it's free software, even the FSF thinks it's fine to use ZFS on your system. The issue is whether it's fine for the ZFS module to be distributed with the Linux kernel.

And automatically updating ports is easy. Set up Poudriere somewhere to build every night, log in, check security notices, and install the already compiled packages.