Re: Bugs in bash (was: Release-critical Bugreport)
On Tue, 1 Jun 1999, Steve Greenland wrote:
> I wasn't clear. What I was implying was that on a Linux system with
> lots of shell users, many of them would probably not be aware of the
> issue and assumed bash == sh, and there would (I'd expect) be a lot more
> "quickie" scripts floating around. On a single-user system, the user is
> the admin, and thus more likely to be following deb-devel or otherwise
> clued-in. Thus, one might be more likely to run into problems when you
> replaced the /bin/sh->bash link with something else.
In the case of a multi-user system, a bashism in a /bin/sh script is still
a bug. If the sysadmin decides to make the /bin/sh -> ash link, it's his
responsibility to inform the users.
If the /bin/sh link will be maintained through the alternatives system,
bash should still have the highest priority, IMO. That way, there is no
problem for people that don't want to change the link.
I think there should be a proper sh(1) man page in this case, which is NOT
linked to the bash(1) man page. It should list all features /bin/sh can be
expected to have, and nothing more.
> > IMHO such scripts are simply broken and in al cases fixed equally simply.
>
> Oh yeah, but you might hear a bunch of griping from your users while
> you were educating them. I certainly don't have any objection to
> "supporting" alternative /bin/sh, and for that matter, wouldn't mind
> changing the default: there seem to be some good reasons to do so.
> But if we do something like this, we need to be ready for a lot of
> complaints/objections/whining.
It should be up to the sysadmin to decide to actually change the link to
point to something else than bash.
Remco
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