Re: experimental bash-2.03 and readline-4.0 packages for potato
Package: bash
Severity: critical
At 19:45 +0100 1999-11-20, Matthias Klose wrote:
>I have put together packages for bash-2.03 and readline-4.0. You find
>them at http://master.debian.org/~doko/bash-rl. Many bugs are fixed.
>Please see the changelogs. A still open issue is a working slink
>update.
There's a serious issue with /bin/sh that needs to be addressed. Some NMU
completely destroyed bash's Essential status[1] by handling the /bin/sh
symlink outside of dpkg's control. The /bin/sh crap needs to be removed
from the maintainer scripts and the binary package needs to contain the
/bin/sh symlink again. This is a critical bug.
>Current status:
> - libreadlineg2 contains /etc/inputrc
> - bash-2.02 is statically linked to libreadlineg2
>
>Assume we do want to link bash dynamically against readline, history
>and ncurses.
Statically linking bash to readline was a stopgap to deal with
libreadline's ABI changing in a rather nasty way between glibc2.0 and
glibc2.1.
It was expected that potato would get libreadline4, after which bash could
be dynamically linked with readline again.
>To avoid this for future libreadline updates, I would like to put
>/etc/inputrc into it's own package (are configuration files in library
>packages evil ;-?)
I think policy needs to explicitly forbid "configuration files" (whether
marked as conffiles or not) in library packages.
[1] Essential means that the package does not need to be depended on
(essential does not seem to be guaranteed to work for implicit
Pre-Depends), however the thing that bash provides that is "essential" is
/bin/sh. /bin/sh is not guaranteed to be present until after the postinst
runs, which means that anything using /bin/sh scripts implicitly
Pre-Depends on bash (depends are satisfied by unpack, pre-depends are
satisfied by unpack and configure). Obviously this is not good.[2]
[2] It should be noted that perl-base now also suffers from this same issue.
--
Joel Klecker (aka Espy) Debian GNU/Linux Developer
<URL:mailto:jk@espy.org> <URL:mailto:espy@debian.org>
<URL:http://web.espy.org/> <URL:http://www.debian.org/>
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