Re: Moving bash from essential/required to important?

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

Lars Wirzenius <liw@liw.fi> writes:

>       * We can perhaps change debhelper to automatically add the
>         dependency, if it is missing. Since most packages use debhelper,
>         this might transition most of the packages automatically.

I've beend thinking about this a while back when I had a package fail
due to missing Depends for some shell script. So I would even take it a
step further.

dpkg-shlibsdebs finds all depends needed for dynamic libraries
automatically. Why not find all depends needed for shell scripts
automatically too?

1) check shebang for the needed shell
2) parse shell script and extract all executables being called
3) lookup packages for for binaries
4) remove essential packages
5) set substvar

So if you have a script like

#!/usr/bin/zsh

if [ grep-dctrl foo bar ]; then
  echo buzz
fi

you would get a dependency on zsh and dctrl-tools.

MfG
        Goswin