Hacktoberfest 2026: the issues maintainers tagged for October, open and beginner-friendly. Browse Hacktoberfest issues

Make sandbox shell configurable

Open
#2,003 2 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
45/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
python

Research direction

Locate where the sandbox currently hardcodes /bin/sh and where sandbox configuration is parsed. Trace how the shell entrypoint is invoked, then verify that the default remains /bin/sh and that configured values such as /bin/dash or /bin/bash are used inside the build sandbox.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Currently sandbox shell is hardcoded to be /bin/sh. This is problematic since it can wildly vary how it works. If system has bash as primary shell, which is common, then /bin/sh will be a very much extended version of POSIX shell so many scripts written with it will not be compatible with eg dash. On the other hand, it is also not full bash. Many projects like freedesktop-sdk expect to be able to write bash syntax in command so it would really be ideal that sandbox grows a variable shell with default value set to /bin/sh for backwards compatibility. When set to eg /bin/dash or /bin/bash, then that entrypoint will be used inside build sandbox.

Dominant language
Python
Stars
144
Forks
45
Avg merge
20h 38m
Merged PRs (30d)
6

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from apache/buildstream

All issues in apache/buildstream

Similar issues

More Python issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.