Russ Allbery wrote:
"Giacomo A. Catenazzi" <cate@debian.org> writes:But probably for the shell cases it is easier to remove 'essential' flag (especially for a minimal nearly POSIX-like shell like dash), because the interface of #!/bin/sh is defined in policy (10.3).Except that every package in Debian that explicitly uses bash has no declared dependency on bash because it's essential. I think attempting to go through and add all those dependencies and test would be a huge waste of time and resources.
but policy recommend not to use bash features on scripts (10.3), and the availability of a POSIX-shell (with few extension) is already provided by policy (still 10.3), thus no need to add package dependencies. Apart of install scripts (which IMHO should be moved when possible to dash, for efficiency reason), I don't think there are so much shell scripts (or better: a large number but not a huge number), and some of such scripts really need to be run with dash for efficiency. For install script (on a server): grep -r '#! */bin/bash' /var/lib/dpkg/info/ | wc -l 26 grep -r '#! */bin/sh' /var/lib/dpkg/info/ | wc -l 1239 But i think we should do this discussion after next release. "one small step for Debian, ..." ciao cate