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

[Frans Pop <elendil@planet.nl>]

Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 26, 2009 at 05:10:59PM +0200, Frans Pop wrote:
>> You're correct of course. If we want to go this way there should be two
>> questions: one for the system shell to use and one for the default user
>> shell, each with per-arch defaults.
> 
> Do you really think that the latter warrants a question?  Admins can set
> their own policies by wrapping adduser; derivers can set their own
> policies by modifying the adduser package.

I'm not sure. I merely wanted to explore the options. But it does seem to 
me that the ability to select the system and user shell at installation 
time could be a nice feature for advanced users.

I think that quite a few sites may want to stick with the "single shell to 
avoid the risk of incompatibilities" option that Manoj put forward. So 
selecting the system shell makes a lot of sense to me.

I'm less sure whether the option of selecting the user shell is really 
needed as well, but if you do one then supporting the other as well is 
probably not all that much more work.
 
>> From the discussion there seem to be three groups:
>> - embedded: want to have only a single, lightweight shell installed for
>>   both system and users;
>> - generic: want a fast system shell, but a more powerful shell for
>>   users; 
>> - conservative: don't want to run any risk with script
>>   incompatibilities and thus want to have the same, powerful shell for
>>   system and users. 
> 
>> It seems to me all three are valid.
> 
> Has anyone actually said in this thread that "I'm developing an embedded
> system and I want the user shell to be dash"?  dash is a terrible user
> shell, after all.

No, they have said "I'm developing an embedded system and I only want dash
installed". Whether that means the system has no users (or at least shell 
using ones) at all, or they'll use dash for the (probably limited) tasks, 
or they want to use some other shell as user shell I don't know.
But in all three cases they want the option of not installing bash as user 
shell, which could be facilitated by a question.
 
> Otherwise, yes, these are all valid cases, but I don't think that's
> really  been a point of contention here; the only contention has been:
> 
> - which configuration is the default?
> - do we need to generalize beyond dash and bash to meet these use cases?

That is indeed the discussion. My thoughts regarding D-I and debootstrap 
are IMO an extention of the first question: how flexible do we want the 
default to be.

Cheers,
FJP