Junichi Uekawa wrote: > Santiago Vila <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> immo vero scripsit: > > > I'd rather document awk to be an exception to the clause > > > because unilaterally loosening this clause will require us > > > to further patch the debootstrap phase. > > > > What do you mean? You speak as if there were lots of essential > > packages using the alternatives mechanism to provide the name of the > > executable to be used. Are there so many? > > Well, there aren't, AFAIK, there is only one. > But I have read your mail as a proposal to > loosening that requirement so that /bin/sh etc. can be > made into alternatives,
Well, yes, more or less. In the example about gawk replacing mawk you'll see that at all times there is a working awk. I don't see a fundamental reason why this should not work for dash and bash. > which will either mean essential systems > need to specify "#! /bin/bash " in their installation scripts, > or there needs to be a further hack on the installation script so > that we can provide bin/sh symlink before bash postinst is run. Such symlink would only be needed in the bootstrapping stage, where we are free to hack whatever we want or need for the purposes of bootstrapping itself. > > > Debootstrap (the Debian installation system) special-cases awk, and > > > creates a symlink. > > Anyway, the answer to : > "dpkg will not prevent upgrading of other packages while an essential > package is in an unconfigured state"? Why should dpkg unconfigure an > essential package to begin with? > > is that before system is bootstrapped, everything is in an > unconfigured state. Dpkg doesn't unconfigure it as such. I don't think that's the answer. You don't upgrade packages until the system is bootstrapped. The current paragraph in policy was added to solve upgrade problems, not bootstrapping problems.
