Re: Proposed new POSIX sh policy, version two
On 23 Nov 2006 13:43:52 +0200, Jari Aalto <jari.aalto@cante.net> wrote:
Bash is not essential for running Debian. It is possible to run old
PCs and old laptops completely free of bash. The point here is not the
disk consumption, but the reduced memory constrainsts. When scripts
are written with only "sh" in mind, they become portable to even
embedded systems (think busybox). Every bash-dependent scipt that runs
on the system, takes memory out from other processes.
If disk-consumption is not the issue, the you don't need to uninstall
it, you just need to point the /bin/sh symlink somewhere else. Bash
can stay where it is and we don't have to have anyone declare
dependancies on it either.
If we want to mandate that maintainer scripts using /bin/sh should
also work with dash, then do that, but I don't think we need we need
to add complexity to the packaging system to deal with this.
Education sector and 3rd world still have PCs that are *years* and
*tears* old. Everybody do not live in countries where computers or
hardware are cheap.
There's a difference between requiring maintainer scripts to say
/bin/bash if they need bash constructs and rewriting existing scripts
to work with some generic shell. The former is going to be *much*
easier. Isn't that enough?
Have a nice day,
--
Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@gmail.com> http://svana.org/kleptog/
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