Re: /bin/sh diversions

[Faidon Liambotis <paravoid@debian.org>]

Wouter Verhelst wrote:
 > There are embedded environments where 80KB is a concern. We're not at
> the level yet where we can reasonably support such environments, but
> there are people who are trying to change that, and I don't think we
> should make it harder for them by setting things up in a way that isn't
> strictly necessary, but is the easy way out.
This change is for the benefit of those environments; it could be the
first step of dropping bash from Essential in favor of dash.

It's certainly doable: 2 years ago I added a lintian check and ran it on
the whole archive. Most packages are easily "fixed" (as in
work-arounded)  by adding a dependency on bash.
The challenge is on preinst/postrm scripts that use bash and should be
rewritten to avoid bashisms (e.g. mysql).

Note that I'm not advocating that since I'm not convinced (yet) that is
needed. Personally, I don't think that Debian will ever target
environments where 80KB (or 107KB) of waste in default install matters.

Regards,
Faidon