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

[Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de>]

Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> writes:

> On Fri, Jul 24 2009, Steve Langasek wrote:
>> 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.
>
>         Right.
>
>>  None of what you're talking about in this subthread actually
>> advances that goal, however.  The blocker for removing bash is that
>
>         Frankly, I think you are overlooking a whole lot of things.
>
>         The frst thing you need to do is to not just make bash
>  removable, you need to determine of this particular user _wants_ it
>  too. You can't just have a limited set of scenarios (people want lean
>  /bin/sh) and not (people want all machines in their environment
>  behaving closer to each other).

I actualy would like to remove bash. Dash seems to be better as
/bin/sh from what people say. And as interactive shell I use zsh. So
why waste the space with an bloated bash?

But that should be a choice. Not forced upon the user. As Manoj has
said now a few times, many things will break for users even if all of
Debian is dash fixed. By making /bin/sh choosable everybody wins.

>> 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.
>
>         Again the tunnel vision on packages -- there are users with
>  installed bases too, which every one seems to just forget.
>
>         The idea I am espousing is that we need to come up with not just
>  replace bash with dash, we need to ask the user if they want to change
>  the default shell, and whether the new default shell should be dash.
>
>         manoj

MfG
        Goswin