Re: itp: static bins / resolving static debian issues

[Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au>]

On Thu, Aug 19, 1999 at 01:44:41PM +0200, Marek Habersack wrote:
> * Raul Miller said:
> 
> > > switched to a posix sh, switching root's shell to sash would
> > > likely be a disaster (i'm disturbed even by the fact that the
> > > postinst for sash asks if it should change root's shell to sash!)
> >
> > For the record, I'm disturbed by this as well, but I'm still (after
> > a year) not sure what I'm going to do about it.
> >
> > This discussion has prompted me to think about this problem
> > differently, however.
>
> I use sash on my machine at home as a root shell and ash on the
> machines at work. Both pose no problems with the shell scripts. They
> are just root shells, not system default shells.

i said root cron jobs, not the init.d scripts.

e.g. someone who's been running debian for years and has various
bashisms and posixisms in /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root - root's shell
has always been bash on debian so that is a fairly common situation.
changing root's shell to sash will immediately break those cron jobs.

easily fixed by setting "SHELL=/bin/bash" or "SHELL=/bin/sh" in the
crontab...but to do that, you first need to know there's a problem and
you probably won't know that until after a few cron jobs have failed.

there's no need to set root's shell to sash, and it presents some fairly
obvious dangers. if someone wants to do it on their own system, that's
fine - but debian systems should NOT automatically break just because a
package has been installed.

craig

--
craig sanders