Re: Switching /bin/sh to dash (part two)
On Tue, Jul 21 2009, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> On Tue, 21 Jul 2009, 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.
>
> We can certainly retain bash as essential but still make dash essential and
> switch to dash.
Can we refrain from this serial essentialness of the
default-shell-du-jour, and arrange for some essential package to pull
in the default shell for the day?
I would be happier of we worked out a a way for the sysadmin to
be able to specify the default shell for the machine, rather than have
Debian decide it for them.
This way, I can have a consistent /bin/sh across my machines,
with different (supported) versions of Debian on them, even if Debian
decides to change it's mind midway about what shell is king of the
hill.
Users may have tonnes of shell scripts (cron jobs, helper
scripts, local commands) that use #!/bin/sh but have come to rely on
the fact that for the last 16 years or so, /bin/sh reliably pointed to
/bin/bash.
The tradeoff of increased boot speed might not matter for users
(certainly does not for me -- I only reboot to switch kernels), and
adding dash or whatever incereases the disk usage for them (they need
bash anywa, and so far have not needed dash -- so adding dash _adds_ to
the bloat).
manoj
--
I'm going to give my psychoanalyst one more year, then I'm going to
Lourdes. Woody Allen
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>
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