Goals and portability (was Re: bash should not be essential)
Santiago Vila Doncel:
> So if we have to admit bashisms in debian/rules, we are in fact saying
> "Debian packages will always be for Debian/Linux distributions".
and later in another message
> No, we are saying "If you want to port a single Debian package to some
> system, you have to Debianize the system first". This is nonsense.
No, it is not nonsense. What we are doing is system integration.
That means taking a large amount of existing software and making it
all work together.
This is not a kind of work whose results can be broken up into pieces
and used in isolation.
In order to do system integration successfully we must define
standards that our own components adhere to so that everything is
compatible with the other parts of our system. There is no absolute
requirement that anything we do be compatible with any particular
thing in the rest of the world.
The ability to change things to make them fit into our world, without
necessarily regarding how the rest of the world do it, is _vital_: it
gives us complete technical control over everything that is a bug in
our system.
If we change our goal and decide that we want to be compatible with
non-Debian systems over which we have no control then there will be
bugs which we cannot even in principle fix in the `right place' -
we'll have to work around them instead.
One of the best things about Debian is that it's mercifully free of
such workarounds for braindamage, precisely because we are able and
willing to fix bugs where they are.
Ian.
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