Hm, I think I recall some install of something that had only dash by default, but I could easily be misremembering. Regardless it has made bash slightly less central, and there are probably other examples of GNU code being displaced.
Originally you said “a lot of GNU pieces have become less central or been displaced in many distros”. I challenge this statement and put it to you to provide examples.
Simply saying “there are probably other examples” will not do. This sounds like simply wishful thinking to me.
So you don't think bash is now "less central"? Off the top of my head, Clang now provides an alternative C compiler. Arguably the windowing system has become more central as there are more users that don't touch the shell, and that has never been GNU. None of this is to say there is not still a substantial amount of GNU code, just that it is a smaller fraction of a typical system than it used to be.
It's by no means wishful thinking - I am a little more a GNU partisan than not.
> The replacement of /bin/sh is not replacing bash. Bash has not been replaced.
Bash has been replaced in its role as /bin/sh. If you're disputing that, I'm confused or baffled. If you're not disputing that, and simply pointing out that most systems are configured to have bash installed and to use bash as the default shell, you're addressing a point I already conceded instead of answering the question I posed: how is it not fair to say that replacing bash with dash in the fairly-central role of "shell which executes system scripts" makes bash "less central"?
