The curious thing here is that with regard to the 
problematic behavior of the echo command, that
"dash" cannot claim to be taking the moral high ground here,
since dash's builtin echo is also not Unix-2003-compliant.

According to
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/echo.html
"Implementations shall not support any options."
but dash's echo supports the (historic BSD) -n option.

There are no Unix 2003 compliant echo commands in
common use!

As that same page says,
"The two different historical versions of echo vary in fatally incompatible 
ways."

Note also how surprising it is to users that the standard shell's
builtin echo is not compatible with the standard /bin/echo.
The whole point of having the shell providing a builtin
command is to provide a *completely* compatible, but higher performing, 
replacement for the standard standalone command.
Since dash's echo is incompatible with GNU echo, dash is
not suitable for use as a standard system shell.
(Perhaps dash originated on a system where its builtin
echo was compatible with that system's /bin/echo?)

If Ubuntu persists in its present course of using dash as /bin/sh,
there will be no way to have future reliable Ubuntu LTS
versions, since dashisms will creep in.  Users will
merely have the choice of different sets of bugs, depending on 
whether they choose /bin/sh to point to /bin/bash or /bin/dash.

-- 
Script that are using bash could be broken with the new symlink
https://launchpad.net/bugs/61463

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