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Re: Switching /bin/sh to dash without dash essential



On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 04:10:54PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> > 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?

Because there's no reason for an end user to care about which shell /bin/sh
points to.  If they care, it's because they're expecting to use it for
something beyond what Policy guarantees it to do; that's not something we
should encourage, they should invoke the shell directly if they want to use
other features.

> > 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.

"Pure bloat"?

$ dpkg -I d/dash/dash_0.5.5.1-2.1_i386.deb |grep Size
 Installed-Size: 216
$

That's scarcely more than the size *increase* in util-linux (an essential
package) between lenny and squeeze:

$ dpkg -I u/util-linux/util-linux_2.13.1.1-1_i386.deb |grep Size
 Installed-Size: 1624
$ dpkg -I u/util-linux/util-linux_2.15.1~rc1-1_i386.deb |grep Size
 Installed-Size: 1736
$

And in an embedded context with /usr/share/doc removed, the only impact is
/bin/dash, which weighs in at a mere 84k.

On whose behalf are you splitting these hairs, exactly?

>         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 think we can engineer lots of things we don't need, this being just one of
them.

If the goal is to make *bash* removable, then I can understand why that
would be helpful to some people since it's the heavier shell by far.  None
of what you're talking about in this subthread actually advances that goal,
however.  The blocker for removing bash is that today, packages invoking
/bin/bash are not required by Policy to depend on it.  And if they did, we
might find that there are Priority: required packages using it, which
there's no policy against, making the exercise more or less pointless.

Oh yeah - libpam0g is one, and libpam0g is transitively essential.

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek@ubuntu.com                                     vorlon@debian.org


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