Alpine Linux 3.5 Ships With ZFS Root File-System Support, Switches To LibreSSL

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Alpine Linux 3.5 Ships With ZFS Root File-System Support, Switches To LibreSSL

The lightweight Alpine Linux distribution that is built around Musl libc and BusyBox and popular in the container space has issued a big update to their Linux operating system...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Alpine-Linux-3.5-Released

[wikinevick]

Wow .. it started. Linux distributions are losing all respect for the FSF and the grain-of-salt legal advice from SFC. Alpine, in particular, also ships with MUSL libc and busybox (and will perhaps replace it with Toybox).

[Chewi]

That isn't necessarily political, it's designed to be lightweight for use in containers. You probably won't interact with the shell directly as a user so why wouldn't they use Busybox?

[Expectations]

Wow .. it started. Linux distributions are losing all respect for the FSF and the grain-of-salt legal advice from SFC. Alpine, in particular, also ships with MUSL libc and busybox (and will perhaps replace it with Toybox).

zfs is licensed under CDDL, which is considered a free software license by the FSF.

[caligula]

That isn't necessarily political, it's designed to be lightweight for use in containers. You probably won't interact with the shell directly as a user so why wouldn't they use Busybox?

Bash provides better compatibility with good old scripts and the disk space is cheap these days. A 1 MB binary isn't that bad when you have 2 TB SSD. In fact many GNU programs like true/false use tons of space.

[Snaipersky]

Bash provides better compatibility with good old scripts and the disk space is cheap these days. A 1 MB binary isn't that bad when you have 2 TB SSD. In fact many GNU programs like true/false use tons of space.

Alpine is meant to also function in very constrained devices like routers. When you have 64MB, everything counts.

[mike4]

zfs root? Is that legal to ship oob?

[Chewi]

Bash provides better compatibility with good old scripts and the disk space is cheap these days. A 1 MB binary isn't that bad when you have 2 TB SSD. In fact many GNU programs like true/false use tons of space.

Busybox is more than just Bash. It covers coreutils and more, which includes those massive true/false binaries.

[staalmannen]

Bash is also not as needed as one might think. The transition from Arch to Alpine was much smoother than expected. I could probably have settled for the default busybox sh as shell but went for mksh.

Bash would only be needed only if you have lots of legacy scripts that you want to migrate and in that case, both bash and coreutils are in the repositories.

[starshipeleven]

Bash provides better compatibility with good old scripts and the disk space is cheap these days. A 1 MB binary isn't that bad when you have 2 TB SSD. In fact many GNU programs like true/false use tons of space.

Bash is only required if your old scripts were written with plenty of bash-isms (bash-only code). POSIX scripts run fine on ash (busybox's shell).