Re: ALERT: XFree86 4.1.0-3 maintainer scripts hosed; please wait for 4.1.0-4

[dman <dsh8290@rit.edu>]

On Thu, Aug 30, 2001 at 10:31:29PM -0700, Karsten M. Self wrote:
| on Fri, Aug 31, 2001 at 12:54:40AM -0400, dman (dsh8290@rit.edu) wrote:
| > On Thu, Aug 30, 2001 at 08:23:55PM -0700, Craig Dickson wrote:
| > | Branden Robinson wrote:
| > | 
| > | > * if your /bin/sh is ash, you will likely have this problem
| > | 
| > | Why would this be the case? I thought all Debian systems (well, I don't
| > | know about pre-Potato versions) had /bin/sh as a symlink pointing to bash.
| > | Wouldn't it sort of be asking for problems to have a non-standard /bin/sh?
| > 
| > A non-standard /bin/sh would be one that isn't POSIX conformant.
| > Watch what happens if I try and remove ash :
| > 
| > # apt-get remove ash
| > Reading Package Lists... Done
| > Building Dependency Tree... Done
| > The following packages will be REMOVED:
| >   ash initrd-tools kernel-image-2.4.8-386 
| > 0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 3 to remove and 0  not upgraded.
| > Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 22.7MB will be freed.
| > Do you want to continue? [Y/n] n
| > Abort.
| > 
| > # 
| > 
| > Not a good thing, I still want a kernel ;-).
| 
| Do you not have a POSIX shell on your system?  The bash shell is also
| confirmant to the IEEE Posix Shell and Tools specification (IEEE Working
| Group 1003.2).

I use bash as my shell.  However the depends for initrd and/or
kernel-image want ash, so /bin/sh is ash.  Maybe that should be
changed to "POSIX_shell" or something, and have bash and ash provide
POSIX_shell?

| The main advantage of ash is that it's 1/5 the size of bash, though with
| some limitations in functionality.  Command line editing is one
| biggie for interactive use...hmmm...turns out ash now has vi mode
| editing, and apparently emacs.  Though I can't seem to get either to
| work.  

I know that ash doesn't handle color-code escapes like bash does.
Apparently it does handle "export FOO='bar'", but /bin/sh on Solaris
needs 2 separate lines for it.

If ash uses readline then you should be able to get vi or emacs line
editing to work by having one of

set editing-mode vi # for vi
set editing-mode emacs # for emacs

in ~/.inputrc or /etc/inputrc.

-D