On Thu, 28 Jul 2011 12:01:36 +0200, Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de> wrote:
> Some people have strong opinions against dash due to its RC bugs that
> don't get fixed. So I guess you will have to defend that solution.
I'm actually not all that strongly opinionated about whether dash is
"the one", but I believe that picking a single, small, standards
compliant to always be /bin/sh is technically preferable to any solution
involving diversions (or worse, using alternatives) for /bin/sh.
Since I've had good experience with dash as /bin/sh and had never heard
"strong opinions against dash", I went and took a look at current state
of dash in the BTS. Here is what I found:
#538822 - grave - dash fails to upgrade if /bin/sh is locally diverted
#540512 - grave - dash upgrade breaks mksh-as-/bin/sh
Both appear to be caused by the history of how the /bin/sh link to
dash was handled. As of 11 April 2011 there is a proposed patch
apparently pending upload to fix these. The proper resolution
would change in any case if we agree to define a specific shell
package as providing /bin/sh.
#582952 - - dash / LINENO-support lets many package FTBFS
This was apparently a case where improving dash to fill possibly
the last remaining hole in dash's POSIX support caused a number of
packages using autoconf to try to use dash instead of bash to
run the configure scripts, which broke them because of
previously undetected bashisms. The impact was worse because of
where we were in the release cycle when this change was made,
but I see no reason to penalize dash for this going forward from now.
And that's it for the current set of bugs at RC severity. Nothing I
found yet changes my previously stated opinion that just making dash be
/bin/sh seems like a good solution.
I will look forward to the discussion tomorrow!
Bdale
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