Re: POSIX shell; bash ash pdksh & /bin/sh
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On 3 Aug 1998, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> Santiago> Thanks. I'm a little suprised that you (more or less)
> Santiago> recognize there is a circular argument here :-)
>
> Why? I may be stubborn, but very rarely have I been accused of
> being downright stupid ;-)
Mmm, I thought we would agree that circular arguments are a stupid thing.
Do you mean it is ok that we do something "just because we do it"?
Frankly, I usually feel better when I do something because there is a real
reason to do it.
> Santiago> The obvious way to break this circle is to make bash
> Santiago> non-essential. If none of the awk's we provide is
> Santiago> essential, why has bash to be essential?
>
> Because it has been essential. No matter how it happened, bash
> was made essential, with the implied promise that bash shall always
> be present on a Debian system.
I don't buy the idea of an "implied promise". Other essential packages
have been downgraded to required, and nobody *ever* talked about "implied
promises". Yes, bash is *currently* more important than those packages,
but the difference here is only cuantitative, not qualitative.
> Like it or not, we are faced now with the circularity; and I
> do not think one should even attempt to break the circle.
Well, if this is really your opinion, I would call it a fundamentalism.
Raul has explained very well which would be the right way to do it, do you
have any objection to any of his points? (Note: We are talking for the
time another posix shell is made available, not before).
> [...]
> >> What are the benefits of not using bash (some of these have
> >> aready been pointed out to the list)
>
> Santiago> I think this is not the point. Each user will have their
> Santiago> own preferences. We just give them the freedom to remove
> Santiago> bash if they like. It is up to them to decide what to do
> Santiago> with that freedom.
>
> They are free to remove the ldso package as well.
This is a really really bad example. As far as I know, there is not a
replacement for ldso, and every dynamically linked ELF binary needs it.
Compare this with the fact that already 90% of our shell scripts are
already /bin/sh and not /bin/bash and you will see how bad your comparison
is.
> However, we do not make it easy for them to do so.
Because there is not a replacement for ldso!
> And I do not think that we are
> required to make it easy for people to remove essential packages.
But this is the circular argument again!
Once bash is non-essential, we would not risk the system at all by
removing it since it would not be essential anymore!
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