Re: bashisems in maintainer scripts.
On Thu, Mar 04, 2004 at 09:55:50PM +0100, David Weinehall wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 04, 2004 at 07:59:06PM +0100, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> >
> > Some questions:
> >
> > Why do you want to disallow maintainers to use some more convenient bash
> > features?
>
> I don't want to disallow them, I want to make bash non-essential, so
> that a base-install doesn't install bash by default, thus allowing for
> a smaller base-system, thus forcing the developers who really need them
> to depend explicitly on bash.
debconf is not essential.
Try an
apt-get remove debconf
on your computer.
> > How do you plan to make an essential package non-essential without
> > breaking anything?
>
> I haven't said it's easy. All scripts that uses bash in their
> maintainer-scripts would have to depend on bash, something which would
> probably be a nice way of making people not use bash-scripts :-)
Not only maintainer scripts.
A package might itself contain bash scripts (and lintian gives an
error for an unversioned dependency on bash).
> The process isn't rocket-science, it's just a very tedious work.
> The first part, cleaning away bashisms from /bin/sh-scripts is just
> bug-fixing though, the second part, cleaning away bash-scripts and
> replacing them with /bin/sh-scripts is something that can be done
> without disrupting anything. It's only the final step, making bash
> non-essential, that'll require a flag-day...
Packages in older stable releases are still allowed to assume bash is
always installed.
What if an old package that is not even in woody (removed packages like
xv) uses bash in it's removal scripts? How do you plan to handle such
cases where bash might be required to remove an ancient package?
>...
> Regards: David Weinehall
cu
Adrian
--
"Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
"Only a promise," Lao Er said.
Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed
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