Re: Proposed new POSIX sh policy
On Wed, Nov 15, 2006 at 11:36:44AM +0100, Gabor Gombas wrote:
> I'm not talking about the local admin. Right now Debian maintainer
> scripts are not allowed to use the "enable" command because that is a
> bashism, and more importantly there is _no reason_ to use the "enable"
> command because simply saying "make /bin/sh point to dash if you want to
> go faster" is much more effective and easier.
> What I'm saying is if you take away the freedom of allowing /bin/sh to
> point to dash, then people who care about shell performance will be
> forced to use other means _even in scripts shipped by Debian_ - and the
> "enable" command is a very powerful tool to achieve that. And at that
> moment you will have exactly the same "builtins aliasing different
> external commands in different scripts" problem as you have now when
> allowing different shells - so you gain nothing by restricting /bin/sh
> to bash.
We don't have to require bash as the one and only /bin/sh in order to
enable maintainer scripts to use "enable". They could test to see if
they are running under bash and only use "enable" bash is being used.
If that isn't allowed by policy it should be. The rule should just be
that the script *works* on non-bash shells (and I really like the
proposal that says a script must work on bash, dash, and a shell to be
named later), not that it be free of bashisms.
- Ted
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