Re: bash exorcism experiment ('bug' 762923 & 763012)

[Thorsten Glaser <tg@mirbsd.de>]

On Sat, 11 Oct 2014, Theodore Ts'o wrote:

> I assume that posh meets the strict definition of 10.4.  And so
> without actually changing policy, someone _could_ try setting /bin/sh
> to be /bin/posh, and then start filing RC bugs against packages that
> have scripts that break.   Yes?

Yes, modulo two things:

① Bugs in posh – posh derives from pdksh, currently.
  It probably would need to be rebased on mksh. I wonder if
  it’s worth doing it upstream; currently, there is not enough
  interest for it from actual users. (I did hear from one or
  the other distro they’d prefer a /bin/sh that did not have
  extensions over POSIX, but…)

② The CTTE decision of #539158 to not overturn Md, which in
  turn requires for a shell to have a printf(1) builtin since
  #428189 (the only way to fix it that does not involve Md)
  is also, de facto, rejected – meaning a switch to posh will
  cause most systems to fail to boot.

  (The mksh binary package ships an lksh binary, which uses
  the C “long” type for arithmetics, as required by POSIX,
  instead of consistent arithmetic ops, and also bundles a
  minimal (busybox/klibc-like) printf builtin, in order to
  be able to use it as /bin/sh on Debian.)

bye,
//mirabilos
-- 
15:41⎜<Lo-lan-do:#fusionforge> Somebody write a testsuite for helloworld :-)