Re: Moving bash from essential/required to important?

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Carsten Hey wrote:
> * Steve Langasek [2011-04-04 19:37 -0700]:
>> On Tue, Apr 05, 2011 at 02:00:36AM +0200, Carsten Hey wrote:

>>>  * Find a sane solution for managing /bin/sh.  Currently diversions are
>>>    used, which looks like the wrong tool for this job to me.  There are
>>>    also some related bugs with a high severity.
>>
>> Also seems to be orthogonal.
>
> I agree that this seems to be orthogonal at first, and even second,
> sight.

And third.  The correct way to manage /bin/sh is as a configuration file.
That means:

 * dash would stop shipping /bin/sh in its data.tar
 * bash would stop shipping /bin/sh in its data.tar
 * an essential package (doesn't matter which --- maybe debianutils)
   should take care of allowing other shells to influence where
   /bin/sh points.

Policy 10.7.4 ("Sharing configuration files") spells this out.  It
doesn't have much to do with whether dependencies on bash are made
explicit.

Hope that helps,
Jonathan