Re: Moving bash from essential/required to important?
* Steve Langasek [2011-04-04 19:37 -0700]:
> On Tue, Apr 05, 2011 at 02:00:36AM +0200, Carsten Hey wrote:
> > Before bash or dash could be made non-essential in a clean way, there
> > are IMHO various things not mentioned up to now in this thread to fix:
>
> > * Fix #428189, either by adapting the policy to reality or vice versa
> > (depending on the maintainers decision) as prerequisite to fix the
> > next point without breaking things afterwards.
>
> This doesn't appear to be relevant to moving bash out of Essential. dash,
> which would still be Essential (no one is proposing removing /bin/sh from
> Essential!), also has printf as a shell builtin.
>
> It would be good to resolve this bug in its own right, but it appears to be
> orthogonal to whether bash is Essential.
This is only relevant because the next point is in my opinion relevant
and fixing the next one might lead the next best maintainer of a policy
complying shell to enable this shell to become /bin/sh. If there is no
correctly documented consensus (in the policy) about what a shell needs
to provide to let scripts rely on printf (and theoretically also [ and
test) being available, this could lead to non-bootable systems.
> > * Find a sane solution for managing /bin/sh. Currently diversions are
> > used, which looks like the wrong tool for this job to me. There are
> > also some related bugs with a high severity.
>
> Also seems to be orthogonal.
I agree that this seems to be orthogonal at first, and even second,
sight. We are using different hacks to manage /bin/sh since about five
years. Making things even more hackish or complicated, e.g. by not
being able to rely on dash or bash to be installed and/or moving /bin/sh
around, would increase the number of corner cases to be caught and thus
make implementing a clean solution even more hard.
Regards
Carsten
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