Bug#367531: debian-policy: Inconsistent requirements wrt bashisms
Package: debian-policy
Version: 3.7.2.0
Severity: minor
In section 10.4, the current Policy is inconsistent. It says:
,----
| The standard shell interpreter /bin/sh can be a symbolic link to any
| POSIX compatible shell, if echo -n does not generate a newline.[59]
| Thus, shell scripts specifying /bin/sh as interpreter should only use
| POSIX features. If a script requires non-POSIX features from the shell
| interpreter, the appropriate shell must be specified in the first line
| of the script (e.g., #!/bin/bash) and the package must depend on the
| package providing the shell (unless the shell package is marked
| "Essential", as in the case of bash).
`----
In the second sentence, adhering to POSIX when the interpreter is
specified /bin/sh is only a "should", in other words violating it would
not be RC. However, in the following sentence, the requirement to
specify an appropriate shell for scripts with non-POSIX features is a
"must" - in other words such bugs would be RC.
I'm not sure which meaning is intended, but the wording should be
clarified.
TIA, Frank
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
APT prefers unstable
APT policy: (99, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.16-1-686
Locale: LANG=de_DE@euro, LC_CTYPE=de_DE@euro (charmap=ISO-8859-15)
-- no debconf information
--
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX)
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