Re: dash bug which is affecting release goal
On Mon February 11 2008 04:19:25 Frans Pop wrote:
> Hmmm. To be honest up till now I was assuming that the change of the
> default would only affect _new_ installs and that existing systems being
> upgraded from Etch to Lenny would be unaffected.
This is certainly good news. If I overlooked a clear announcement
that this was the intention then I apologize. However, it does
exarcerbate another problem that we already face on on many new
Debian installations.
Because different Debian stables differently initialize various
defaults which are preserved across upgrades, incompatibilities
frequently arise between otherwise equivalent systems with
different ancestries. A single example to illustrate:
I had been aware for a long time that some older boxes have
/boot/boot/grub where most newer boxes use /boot/grub. This had
not been worth the effort to change the older boxes as everything
just worked and grub changes carry a slight but significant risk of
boot failure and downtime. However a round of "grub install '(hd0)'"
(after a grub upgrade) worked on the newer boxes but failed to find
menu.lst on the older /boot/boot/grub boxes.
Even if I still had a copy of Potato I doubt it would support the
latest hardware so installing an ancient version and dist-upgrading to
the latest stable is not a practical solution and instead when we install
a new copy of Debian we have to resort to lots of diffs and trying to
figure out which differences are significant.
I would therefore ask DDs to keep this issue in mind and to please
minimize defaults changes between releases.
Returning at last to our sheep, it would be preferable if the default
/bin/sh were to remain bash and if Debian scripts were to use
#!/bin/sh.minimal. This does not preclude Debian making it easy for
/bin/sh to be changed by those Debian users who wish to make such a
change, possibly even during D-I.
--Mike Bird
Reply to: