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

[Giacomo Catenazzi <cate@debian.org>]

Gabor Gombas wrote:
> Hi,
>
> 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?
>
> posh (or "strict POSIX" in general) is simply not practical, and zsh is
> even more bloated than bash. But this was discussed to death...
>  
> >         I think one of the objections here is that we ought to have a
> >  more generic approach that allows shells other than dash/bash to be the
> >  default shell, and that the vendor not make the choice.
>
> And a possible response to such an objection that the bash->dash
> transition is difficult enough. Do this specific transition first, and
> revisit the generalization only after the lessons from the bash->dash
> transition have been learned.

When a program will gain the essential flag, it will be forever.
So yet will need to support one shell bash. tomorrow two
shells (bash and dash). In future could we support three
shells?  Note: also when upstream will stop supporting
the program (e.g. new POSIX version, etc).

The discussion is about "essential" (check the subject),
not really what shell will be the default on tomorrow
and future debian systems.

ciao
	cate