Neil Williams wrote:This seems like a specious argument to me. If reinstalling coreutils, (and all of the other packages supplanted including util-linux, grep, gzip, hostname, procps, login, mktemp, etc), doesn't restore your system, then there's a bug in the packaging.One reason is that busybox doesn't come with an 'uninstall' option, just an install. I've been bitten by that many times. It's a bit of a fiddle finding the busybox versions and removing them. It is probably safer to not activate busybox by default than to risk an imperfect uninstall script in postrm that leaves the system with a damaged coreutils setup. Reinstalling coreutils won't always fix the issue either. This same argument could be applied to coreutils by saying that IF it didn't uninstall correctly then it should never be installed in the first place and therefor we should never install coreutils. I think the logical fallacy here is a little more obvious than with busybox, but I think the same fallacy applies to both. This also seems like a specious argument. Most of the FSF packages also behave differently depending on how they are configured. Eg, emacs with X11 support vs emacs without X11 support.(For the uninitiated, you install the busybox package then run an install command on the system and it is this that puts the busybox executable in place so that it replaces the functionality of 'ls' etc. the difficulty is that precisely which commands get replaced is entirely down to the configuration chosen by the user *prior* to running the install command.) I guess the second reason is that configuration step - it allows busybox to be customised prior to activation but I may be wrong on that. Have you asked the busybox maintainer? Part of the value added by debian is that debian makes these sorts of choices for most end users such that end users don't have to do so. There aren't really any user choices when building a source debian package into binary debian packages. There's no configuration step for the debian package. (Yes, there's configuration for the upstream distribution, but this is intended to be hidden by the package maintainer - at least, as far as I understand it which could be flawed.) No, I haven't asked the busybox maintainer. I figured that a step as big as fixing this, which would necessarily involve changes to 10's of packages including many which were already deemed "essential" would require a much larger blessing. That would be an overloaded application of the udeb format and one which, as far as I can understand, is specifically disfavored by the debian developer community. --rich |