Re: Pre-Depends of #CDD#-common meta packages from cdd-common
On Sat, Jun 12, 2004 at 08:22:45PM +0100, Andrew Suffield wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 12, 2004 at 08:21:17PM +0200, David Weinehall wrote:
> > > > We're talking about
> > > > removing one bashism in a script to make it more portable
> > > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> > > False. Please come back when you have some comprehension of what
> > > portable shell scripting means. There's a chapter in the autoconf
> > > manual that might clue you in.
> >
> > There's portable, then there's portable. Being portable to still
> > developed platforms is reasonable, being portable to Unixen from 1977 is
> > not.
>
> Then what are you trying to accomplish? All of those platforms have
> bash available. If those are the only ones you are interested in, bash
> is *already* perfectly portable, so there's no gain to be had.
True. However, not all admins of other OS's share the opinion that bash
is a shell that should be installed on all systems...
> > > Please stop this pointless crusade against bash. All it can accomplish
> > > is to introduce bugs where previously there were none. Throwing around
> > > words like "portability" does not accomplish anything.
> >
> > It is *NOT* a crusade against bash. I use bash as my primary shell for
> > all my workstations, my laptop, and my server (and my MacOS X-machine).
> > I'd rather be able to avoid having it installed on my embedded machine,
> > though. 1MB of storage doesn't matter squat on my 40GB drive on my
> > laptop, but it's a 32nd of the total space on my embedded device.
>
> It's 600k in the package, or 300k if you build it without all the
> extra extensions for interactive use. You're going to have a hard time
> finding a smaller shell than that, without simply farming out all the
> functionality into other programs (which is counter-productive), and
> it's a waste of time anyway when there are invariably much larger
> things that can be tackled.
I don't have a hard time at all. posh, for instance, is much smaller
than that (103k) and POSIX-compliant, dash is 84k (has had some
compliance-bugs, but is getting pretty close now), and busybox-cvs is
138k (don't know how POSIX-compliant it is, though).
Of course, they are not really what you would choose as your favourite
shell for interactive use, but for embedded devices you seldom use the
shell except for scripts.
I'm working on tackling other things as well. Something has to be done
first though, and these changes are all small and non-intrusive, so it's
a good place to start. Most other changes to minimise disk and/or
memory-usage are far more intrusive. I cannot possibly see why you
oppose changing things not to rely on bashisms, considering that I have
promised to provide patches for all packages in base if needs be.
You may think it's a time-consuming task, but it won't consume *your* time
(well, except for the time you spend arguing here...), it's not going to
prevent you from having bash as your favourite shell, nor is it going to
prevent you from having /bin/sh as a symlink to /bin/bash.
Regards: David Weinehall
--
/) David Weinehall <tao@acc.umu.se> /) Northern lights wander (\
// Maintainer of the v2.0 kernel // Dance across the winter sky //
\) http://www.acc.umu.se/~tao/ (/ Full colour fire (/
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