Re: Switching /bin/sh to dash without dash essential
On Thu, Jul 23 2009, Siggy Brentrup wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 11:19 -0400, Sam Hartman wrote:
>
>> Folks, there was a longish discussion on IRC starting about an hour
>> ago about dash and bash.
>
> These discussions are extremely long standing :) The move away from
> bash has been aimed at long before I vanished from the project in 2004.
> I'm really upset that 5 years are not enough to accomplish the move.
I think because few proponents actually think through the impact
on end user machines. There are more constituencies to Debian than just
embedded users, and people write shell scritps on their own, and use
it as cron jobs, helper functions (I use a couple to handle mailto:
URI's in mozilla to fire up gnus). The impact on these systems bigger,
since there are more of them, and embedded systems end users, who can
definitely switch the link themselves.
>> 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?
>
> So you are complaining about a small package (installed size 224)
> becoming essential while forcing the embedded ppl to work around a
> monster (installed size 1236); numbers taken from my Ubuntu laptop
> where both are essential, I hope only for a limited period of time.
> Although preferring CLI over GUI I don't use both of them, I prefer
> zsh for my daily work but my #!/bin/sh scripts are always posixly
> correct.
There is a traedeoff between an embedded system, and machines
where user tools and cron jobs may break which
>
>> 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.
>
> As long as /bin/sh refuses extensions to posix I agree with you, but
> bashism has been a cuss word for years before 2004.
Source? Policy does not even ban bashims for maintainer scripts.
manoj
--
How can you be in two places at once when you're not anywhere at all?
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>
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