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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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