Re: "dpkg-reconfigure" dash no longer works

[S M <mythrowy777@hotmail.com>]

On Fri, Jun 09, 2023 at 04:07:03PM -0400, Greg Wooledge wrote:

> Nothing you wrote here is incorrect, but none of it explains the policy
> change that has occurred.  I won't even say it's a bad policy change.
> It makes at least a little bit of sense...

Yeah, I'd also like to know what was the reason to change this.
Regarding a workaround, I ended up creating a symlink /usr/local/bin/sh
pointing to bash and chsh to that.

But, the way I see it, any portable POSIX-compliant script should be
able to run in both dash and bash. If a script runs with dash but not
bash, it means one of three things:

   1 The script is not portable to begin with. (the script has a bug or
   the wrong shebang)

   2 The script is interpreted incorrectly by bash but not dash. (bash
   has a bug)

   3 The script is portable but it's interpreted incorrectly by dash,
   and this wrong behavior is what the scriptwriter wants. (dash has a
   bug)

So it seems to me that this change will only end up sweeping bugs under
the rug. Which I guess is not that bad of a thing as long as the system
works, but I digress. In any case, all three can be fixed by changing
the shebang to #!/bin/dash without much additional work. So I'm just
curious about what was the reason behind taking away this choice from
the user.