Re: dc and bc in Important?
--------
On Tue, Jun 24 1997 15:52 BST James Troup writes:
> John Goerzen <jgoerzen@gesundheit.cs.twsu.edu> writes:
>
> > It seems to me that dc and bc aren't vital to the workings of a
> > system (when I deselect them, dselect doesn't warn about any
> > dependencies), yet they are in Important. Why?
>
> Because they match the first definition of Important in Policy (see
> below). When I released my first version of bc/dc I downgraded them
> to Optional by mistake and someone complained; that's obviously one
> person who agrees with me. Does anyone else think bc/dc should be
> downgraded? (If so, why?)
>
> ``Important programs, including those which one would expect to find
> on any Unix-like system. If the expectation is that an experienced
> Unix person who found it missing would go `What the F*!@<+ is going
> on, where is foo', it should be in important. This is an important
> criterion because we are trying to produce, amongst other things, a
> free Unix.'' (3.1.4.1 of debian-policy 2.1.3.3)
Correlated note: It is not explicitely stated in the policy manual, but
IMO we should flag all utilities mentioned in the POSIX.2 standard as
'Important' (or eventually give another label, POSIX.2). These are
(I'm listing the commands, not the package. Figuring out which command
belongs into which package is left as an exercice for the labeller):
(Execution Environment Utilities:)
awk, basename, bc, cat, cd, chgrp, chmod, chown, cksum, cmp, comm, command [1],
cp, cut, date, dd, diff, dirname, echo, ed, env, expr, false, find, fold,
getconf, getopts, grep, head, id, join, kill, ln, locale, localedef, logger,
logname, lp [2], ls, mailx, mkdir, mkfifo, mv, nohup, od, paste, pathchk, pax,
pr, printf, pwd, read, rm, rmdir, sed, sh, sleep, sort, stty, tail, tee, touch,
tr, true, tty, umask, uname, uniq, wait, wc, xargs,
(User Portability Utilities)
alias, at, batch, bg, crontab, csplit, ctags, df, du, ex, expand, fc, fg, file,
jobs, man, mesg, more, newgrp, nice, nm, patch, ps, renice, split, strings, tabs,
talk, time, tput, unalias, unexpand, uudecode, uuencode, vi, who, write,
(Software Development Utilities)
ar, make, strip.
[1] bash builtin
David
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