On Thu, Sep 26, 2002 at 01:49:52PM +0100, Julian Gilbey wrote: >On Thu, Sep 26, 2002 at 08:15:58AM -0400, Anthony DeRobertis wrote: >> Yep. This a more serious problem. I don't think its unsolvable, though; >> how does the current /bin/sh link get set up? I'd think bash postinst >> could change it to an alternative, but this leaves the problem of if >> update-alternatives requires a working /bin/sh > >The current link is part of the bash package. The preinst checks >whether this either points to bash (or /bin/bash) and if not, that it >is diverted using dpkg-divert. If neither of these are the case, the >admin is warned of this and the link is reset to bash. > >Note that alternatives are handled from maintainer scripts and >diversions from within dpkg itself (as well as via alternatives). > >I don't know the full rationale.
bash is an essential package and therefore must (ยง2.3.7) supply all core functionality when unconfigured--which precludes the use of update-alternatives (run when configuring the package) if you consider /bin/sh as being part of bash's core functionality. perl broke this rule when managing /usr/bin/perl with u-a when there were multiple packages... chaos ensued in quite a few cases when that symlink dissapeared. Granted that was compounded by u-a being implemented in perl, but even so this kind of additional complexity when dealing with something as important as /bin/sh is not warranted. --bod
