Re: dash as default /bin/sh and bashisms-free archive RGs
Josselin Mouette wrote:
> Le mercredi 15 avril 2009 à 02:16 -0700, Russ Allbery a écrit :
>> > Actually it would be better to specify that scripts must work with both
>> > sh implementations available in Debian, being bash and dash, rather
>> > than making nothing more than a fork of the POSIX spec.
>>
>> The advantage of the current Policy approach is that we have some hope of
>> introducing a new /bin/sh down the road, and we don't require that
>> packages comply with bugs in dash that should be fixed in dash.
>
> Policy documents practice. When that new /bin/sh exists, you can change
bash is the current /bin/sh, from your statements I could imply that we
should require all /bin/sh's to support: b0rken bash arrrays, shell
regexes!, ${RANDOM,HOSTNAME,{E,}UID}, pushd, popd, let, exec -c/-l/-a, ...?
lots of those features are used in the wild, thus "practice."
And taking your statement to the extreme, it means that if zsh was used
as /bin/sh then no other shell interpreter could ever be used as /bin/sh
ever again but a fork of zsh.
Policy is here, in part, to avoid such a mess and require/provide a sane
environment. And actually going in the opposite way you propose, I filed
#490604 a while ago to avoid such misconceptions.
> the policy to require packages to comply with this new implementation.
> It doesn’t change anything from the maintainers’ point of view, but it
> avoids a useless work of formalization.
>
Cheers,
Raphael Geissert
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