Re: Switching /bin/sh to dash without dash essential
On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 10:38:51AM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 24 2009, Steve Langasek wrote:
> > On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 09:31:04AM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> >> I think you are not going far enough. Why should I have dash on
> >> the system when my default shell is posh? or (gasp) zsh?
> > Why would you set your default shell to posh? It's only marginally smaller
> > than dash, and my understanding is that it's slower. It's more minimal from
> > a policy perspective, but I don't see that this is relevant for a live
> > Debian system.
> > What's the advantage of having it be zsh? Is zsh faster than dash? Or is
> > the only savings the elimination of the 84k dash binary from /bin?
> It allows all the #!/bin/sh scripts that us zsh-isms to run.
They can already be run under #!/bin/zsh. Why would we want to tie our
hands even further as a distribution by putting ourselves in the position of
having end users deploying /bin/sh scripts that require zsh, *in addition*
to the end users who already deploy /bin/sh scripts that require bash?
> > And I think it has yet to be demonstrated that it's actually useful to
> > support all these other possible values of /bin/sh. Without a concrete
> > reason why these configurations should be supported, generalizing the
> > implementation is needless overhead.
> Demonstrated to whom? You see, viability of alternatives has to
> be demonstrated to the decision maker. My contention is that the Vendor
> ought not to be the decision maker here, that the quality of
> implementation of the OS improves if the system owner or custodian has
> the ability to make that determination.
I propose to turn /usr/bin/make into an alternative so that Debian is not
robbing users of the ability to decide they want it to point to pmake.
--
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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