On the road to a smaller and more POSIX-compliant base...
Hoping to be able to make Debian an even better platform for embedded
systems, I have patched (almost) all packages in base to remove use of
XSI:isms, csh:isms, bash:isms, and probably a GNU:ism or two; it's a bit
hard to classify, I just know that things are more close to POSIX now =).
I bet there still remain some non-POSIX stuff, but unless I missed
anything obvious, base should now be usable with posh (or another
POSIX-compliant shell) instead of bash.
This change in itself doesn't really do much of a difference, since bash
is "only" 628kB (but posh is only 103kB, so there's still a gain of more
than 500kB), but I'm going to continue this work in an attempt to make
base able to use busybox as an replacement for various other things.
I have only just started submitting the patches to the various
package-maintainers, and I don't want to rush this, since some of the
changes are not really bug-fixes, just rewrites of bash-scripts to real
sh-scripts (although most of the changes _are_ fixes, since there are a
LOT of maintainer-scripts that assumes /bin/sh == /bin/bash.), and I
also don't want this to be misunderstood as a crusade against bash
(being an avid bash-user, that would kinda of feel awkward)...
Anyone interested in helping, either with trying my patches, or by
merging them (if you (co-)maintain a package in base, that is)? Feel
free to contact me.
Packages outside of base may still be of interest to fix, if they are
commonplace enough that they will be installed on most embedded systems.
I will not try to fix things that have a huge list of requirements
however, since that would require fixing all the required packages as
well... Of course, having all /bin/sh-scripts in Debian really be
sh-scripts rather than bash-scripts _would_ be a nice feat, but I think
it'll take quite some time to even reach a situation where all the fixes
for base are merged.
Never-the-less, alea iacta est, feel free to comment on this effort.
I'm going to do the final patch-audit today or tomorrow, to make sure I
haven't made any incorrect substitutions, then I'll publish an URL here
to the patches.
Regards: David Weinehall
--
/) David Weinehall <tao@acc.umu.se> /) Northern lights wander (\
// Maintainer of the v2.0 kernel // Dance across the winter sky //
\) http://www.acc.umu.se/~tao/ (/ Full colour fire (/
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