Re: bash should not be essential
Santiago Vila Doncel <sanvila@unex.es> writes:
> > How does one satisfy the need for an essential POSIX bourne shell
> > with multiple possibilities?
>
> Having a virtual package tagged as essential.
Say what? How do you tag a virtual package as essential?
> > You, surely, *must* have at least one POSIX bourne shell marked as
> > essential, otherwise people can totally hose their system by
> > removing all bourne shells, and if there isn't an essential one
> > you can't assume the presence of a POSIX bourne shell for the
> > purpose of dependencies.
>
> I think this is not true. Virtual packages allow that. We could
> create an essential package named "posix-shell".
And that helps how? Or did you mean an essential virtual package? If
so see above.
> If (currently) virtual packages are not (technically) allowed to be
> essential, I think we have a work-around: we could choose *any*
> essential package and make it to pre-depend on "posix-shell", this
> way at least one posix-shell should be installed to satisfy the
> dependency. The end result would be the same.
_doh_, no it would not. In the case you suggest above I could remove
bash with a simple --force-depends and totally hose my system; that is
*Evil*. (Lots of people use --force-depends, very few use
--force-remove-essential)
> As I said, if the only problem is of *technical* type, we should
> start considering bash as non-essential *now* and discourage the use
> of #!/bin/bash scripts by policy.
So in fact we're talking about something that might potentially be
workable in the future but as of right now you have no real idea of
how to do it. Sorry, but I agree with Rob, it is a complete waste of
time discussing this, bash is a) portable and b) not that big, I am
firmly of the opinion that requiring bash is not a bad thing, and that
there are better things to spend time on. Since the all new-hip-thing
seems to be voting, count me as firm no for any change to the status
of bash.
--
James
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