Re: Bug#161455: debian-policy: reference to ash outdated
On Thu, Sep 26, 2002 at 01:49:52PM +0100, Julian Gilbey wrote:
>On Thu, Sep 26, 2002 at 08:15:58AM -0400, Anthony DeRobertis wrote:
>> Yep. This a more serious problem. I don't think its unsolvable, though;
>> how does the current /bin/sh link get set up? I'd think bash postinst
>> could change it to an alternative, but this leaves the problem of if
>> update-alternatives requires a working /bin/sh
>
>The current link is part of the bash package. The preinst checks
>whether this either points to bash (or /bin/bash) and if not, that it
>is diverted using dpkg-divert. If neither of these are the case, the
>admin is warned of this and the link is reset to bash.
>
>Note that alternatives are handled from maintainer scripts and
>diversions from within dpkg itself (as well as via alternatives).
>
>I don't know the full rationale.
bash is an essential package and therefore must (§2.3.7) supply all core
functionality when unconfigured--which precludes the use of
update-alternatives (run when configuring the package) if you consider
/bin/sh as being part of bash's core functionality.
perl broke this rule when managing /usr/bin/perl with u-a when there
were multiple packages... chaos ensued in quite a few cases when that
symlink dissapeared.
Granted that was compounded by u-a being implemented in perl, but even
so this kind of additional complexity when dealing with something as
important as /bin/sh is not warranted.
--bod
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