Re: Switching /bin/sh to dash without dash essential
On Thu, Jul 23 2009, Luk Claes wrote:
> Sam Hartman wrote:
>>
>> Folks, there was a longish discussion on IRC starting about an hour
>> ago about dash and bash.
>>
>> I agree we want to move the default /bin/sh to /bin/dash.
>> However I'm failing to understand why we want dash to be essential.
>> If I'm not using dash as my /bin/sh why do I need it?
>>
>> If the answer is that we really do want it everywhere independent of
>> what /bin/sh is, that's fine. However, that's not obvious to me.
>
> We want everyone to use dash by default.
Who is we? Why is the sysadmin not the one making the decision?
Why is the Vendor making this decision for the user?
> If someone does not want to use the default, they are free to do so,
> but the default system shell is supposed to always be on the system.
Why? Is there a technical reason, or because you say so?
Frankly, if a user is happy with bash, they need bash anyway
cause they have users that use it as an interactive shell, adding dash
is pure bloat. They might not care for the 4 seconds it saves them on
boot, since they rarely boot.
I think we can engineer a system where Debian suggests various
shells as the default shell, and the user selects one. And only the
selected default shell is one that can't be removed from the system.
I kinda like the mawk/gawk solution, which has
worked. Admittedly, /bin/sh is rather more critical to get right, but I
think we have the ability to craft a solution to do so.
manoj
--
filibuster, n.: Throwing your wait around.
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>
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