Re: portability as a goal for debian?

[Richard Braakman <dark@xs4all.nl>]

On Tue, Mar 06, 2001 at 08:44:36PM -0500, Sam Hartman wrote:
>     Adrian> GNU tar is essential. That means you can assume that it is
>     Adrian> installed on every Debian system.
> 
>     Adrian> Do you really want to change this?
> 
> No, but I support those who do.  A tar should be essential.  I see no
> reason why it should be gtar.  POSIX defines sufficient functionality
> that if someone sees significant benefit to using some other tar for
> another port, I do not have a problem moving in the direction of POSIX
> tar just as we now only require POSIX shell.

We don't only require POSIX shell.  bash is an Essential package.
The only thing that changed is that scripts that use bash extensions
have to start with #!/bin/bash instead of #!/bin/sh.

(But I'm not going to start using "gtar" -- I gladly left it behind
when I bade goodbye to SunOS.)

Richard Braakman