Re: Bug#264241: Some corrections regardings statements in this bug

[Florent Rougon <f.rougon@free.fr>]

Adrian Bunk <bunk@fs.tum.de> wrote:

> I haven't seen benchmarks that dash was faster than bash.
>
> But even if it is, it doesn't matter much:
>
> The maintainer scripts of teTeX spend significantly more time with 
> running programs like mktexlsr or ftmutil than in the shell they are 
> using.
>
> Even a factor of let's say two in the speed of the shell wouldn't make 
> much difference for the total time.
>
> And if you want to speed up package installation and removal, e.g.  
> improving how dpkg reads it's database would definitely be of more 
> effect than the effect of using a different /bin/sh .

I agree. I am not trying to push anything here (well, except avoiding
obscuring maintainer scripts for reasons that are not valid in this
case); I just listed two reasons why people might want to chose the
#! /bin/sh approach and slightly alter their code in easy cases
instead of going with #! /bin/bash.

>> Right. They get to keep the pieces together, but as long as they are
>> willing to do so, I do not mind.
>
> There's not much use in supporting broken systems.

Nobody is asking you to support them in this case.

> If you do this, you have to get it 100% right.
>
> And there are evil special cases you have to consider. An example:
>
> Consider a potato package that uses #!/bin/bash in the postrm script, 
> and that was removed but not purged at potato time.
>
> If bash is no longer essential, and the user attemts to purge this 
> ancient package without bash installed it will fail.
>
> This is just one non-trivial problem that immediately comes into my 
> mind, and there might be others hidden.

"Non-trivial" because you would need to support a lot of users through
the transition, but it seems every problem would be fairly easy to spot
for experienced users. That is why I wouldn't say the transition is
_impossible_ without stronger evidence.

But again, I am not lobbying for any such transition. I agree it would
be a lot of work for almost nothing (perhaps even a negative effect due
to the probable growth of the Packages file that would result from the
added dependencies).

> That much effort for getting rid of 600 kB?
>
> Wow, there are really people who don't have anything useful to do in 
> their spare time...

Well, this is *their* spare time...

-- 
Florent