[No need to send me copies of replies, thanks] Hi,
Goswin von Brederlow wrote: > Hi, > > in the talk you said you add a choice for /bin/sh and you add more > freedom. True. > > The choice being that the admin may dpkg-divert /bin/sh to whatever > shell he wants and he then can fix whatever breaks. Great. We already > have exactly that now. There is nothing added. What has been "added" is that there's no silly reason anymore to have bashisms on the /bin/sh scripts. > No mechanism and no > assurances that things won't break. > If you use dpkg-divert, it won't break unless you do it wrong, but there's not much we can do about that. We can not prevent anyone from rm /bin/sh either. > > You say that dash is configurable as /bin/sh via debconf but in the > next sentence you say you want dash to ship a /bin/sh link to dash. True > So > the deconf thing is purely a temporary thing and goes away. There > won't be a choice left. Users will just get /bin/sh pointing to dash > period. No, /bin/sh is shipped to guarantee a symlink. > > > You say that the default /bin/sh must be an essential package as only > way to make sure it is always present. That is clearly wrong and we > have mawk/gawk as a real life example of having something always > installed (awk) while still keeping the choice open. That's not the case during debootstrap. > Overall I take 2 things from your talk: > > 1) You are removing bashisms from scripts using /bin/sh > > That is a good thing and your work there is verry welcome. Thanks for > investing time there. This is actually where all the benefits really > come from. Kudos there. Everything else seems to be just window > dressing. > > 2) You are bloating the system and essential packages list > > You are simply replacing A with B. You are not adding any choice > mechanism or garanties that a /bin/sh other than dash will work. We have tested it, it works. > If > admins dpkg-divert /bin/sh and use another shell they will be totaly > left out in the cold with fixing any problems. That's not new. > Some maintainer will > just close bugreports saying the only /bin/sh is dash. If that ever happens, the maintainer should be taught that that's not true, just like it is done in many other situations. > > You say you give admins a choice to divert /bin/sh to whatever (posix) > shell they like. But you only give them a choice of adding yet another > shell. Not a choice of replacing dash. Only a choice of adding even > more. After diverting /bin/sh instead of having one useless shell we > now have 2 useless shells on the system. At least until bash becomes > non essential. You could actually say the same about many other, even essential, tools; so I don't see it as a problem. It is a period of transition. > > Will it eventually be policy that essential/required/standard packages > must not depend on bash? Because as long as something in the core > packages depends on bash it will remain non removable. > I'm not the right person to answer that as I'm not the person who wants to pursue that change. Cheers, Raphael Geissert -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org