Re: core recovery tools, apt-get, and dpkg should be static

[Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@ualberta.ca>]

>     The first question is, is sash enough? It doesn't include dpkg or
>     apt-get's functionality, in particular. Is that really worthwhile
>     though? What sort of failure modes are there that a statically
>     linked dpkg/apt would help with that are actually plausible. I
>     assume minimising downtime for people who type "rm /lib/*" isn't a
>     particularly high priority (whereas minimising downtime due to bash
>     being removed by apt is much more reasonable).

Both dpkg and APT have a wack of external dependencies. To fully use dpkg
you need a working sh, rm, tar, gzip, libc6, dpkg-deb, find, libdpkg.  APT
requires dpkg, libapt-pkg, libc6 and libstdc++.

When a maintainer messes up (like for bash) you can recover using:

dpkg-deb -x /var/cache/apt/archives/bash*.deb /
dpkg -i /var/cacahe/apt/archives/basin*.deb
 
The only absolutely critical, must not screw up packages are:
  libc6
  gzip
  tar
  dpkg

You loose any of those and you need a boot disk.

Jason