I think people are better off coding to a standard shell (as necessary), and otherwise using whatever shell makes them happy for day-to-day use.
Sure. I'm just saying that, in my own case, switching from zsh to bash has meant that instead of worrying about making sure that zsh is installed and up to date on all my systems and that all the various addons and plugins I used to need for zsh are available, I just have to make sure my .bashrc is available. And even if it isn't I don't lose much. So I get a functional, familiar environment in all the cases that matter to me with no extra hassles.
My favored point on that continuum is to skip the 'various addons and plugins' and just apt-get install zsh on all my machines. To skip zsh altogether seems like throwing the baby out with the bath water. I tend to think of it as a better bash implementation.
Re:Oh My zsh
by silentbicycle on Tuesday September 07, 2010 @04:47PM
(#1670039)
Yeah, and while I don't use zsh, I keep all my emacs config in a git repository with my other dotfiles. That plus apt-get / pkg_add / etc. seems to solve the problem nicely.
I think people are better off coding to a standard shell (as necessary), and otherwise using whatever shell makes them happy for day-to-day use. bash isn't actually the former, though, and it has strong competition for the latter, so it's probably a bad compromise.
I've also done porting for OpenBSD, and the whole bash thing is a pet peeve of mine. It's not just me, though - look at the situation with Debian and eglibc due to bugs like these (http://sources.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=3266 http://sources.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=9901).
* I mean, how many other problems in software are due to people prematurely overgeneralizing?