Re: Switching /bin/sh to dash (part two)
"Giacomo A. Catenazzi" <cate@debian.org> writes:
> Why?
> "Always installed" is different to "essential", see e.g. libc.
libc is essential from a Policy perspective. It's just not marked that
way in the packaging system in case the SONAME changes, but it's essential
in the same way that awk is. Note that dependencies on awk are not
required (and indeed are a Lintian warning).
> I really think that some essential package would depends on bash (in
> this case would be passwd, who provides useadd/chsh/..).
In which case bash should stay essential with the essential flag; if we're
going to guarantee that it's part of the essential set anyway, may as well
let everyone rely on all the things that entails.
> If we remove the essential flag, we have a nice feature: the packages
> who needs bash need to be documented (via Depends).
> I'm contrary to essential flags on shells, not because we should remove
> shells from debian systems, but I really think that explicitly
> documenting dependencies is really a good things for us and for
> interoperability.
It sounds more like you're opposed to omitting dependencies on essential
packages in general rather than wanting bash not to be essential.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Reply to: