-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Santiago> I want to change the policy. I think bash should not be > Santiago> essential.
> Manoj> Why? Because this seems to be the only way of encouraging #!/bin/sh in favour of #!/bin/bash... > Manoj> Do we have any alternatives? Currently, maybe not. In fact, I am not worried by the fact that bash is essential or not. I am worried by the fact that so many packages depend on it. I would like bash to be non-essential if only to know how many packages would have to add a Depends: line in the control file. This is about portability in the general sense. One of the features of free software is that you are free to use it or not to use it. For example, if you need an awk implementation and you don't like mawk, you can use gawk, or viceversa. If so many packages depend on bash, users who symlink sh ->someotherPOSIXshell will never be able to get rid of bash, if they do not like it. We started talking about bashisms in debian/rules. Ian said debian/rules was just for building Debian/Linux packages, so bash should be always there and we do not have to worry about it. Well, I'm not saying that our packages should build on every Unix platform, as GNU software does. I'm saying just that allowing #!/bin/bash for shell scripts is a bad idea. I would like everybody to consider the teTeX case: It started as a TeX distribution for Linux. Well, nowadays, teTeX is the most famous ready-to-run TeX distribution for *Unix*, and it runs on *a lot* of different architectures. Its "texconfig" script is #!/bin/sh. Yes, 36594 bytes of non-bash-dependent Bourne shell scripting language. Maybe when Thomas Esser released the first version of teTeX, he didn't imagine that some years later it was going to be a general Unix distribution. But I'm sure that if he would have thought from the beginning "teTeX will always be for Linux", we would not have now teTeX for a lot of architectures. So if we have to admit bashisms in debian/rules, we are in fact saying "Debian packages will always be for Debian/Linux distributions". We have already seen that this is not completely true with Debian/Solaris. I still don't see why people who want to port *some* Debian packages to Solaris (not the *entire* Debian distribution) should be forced to port bash as the first package, if /bin/sh has (or should have) the same basic functionality. > I think we need to be able to depend on having *some* POSIX-like sh > available on the system, and it seems to me that only marking a package > essential can ensure that. As I said, if this is a technical problem, we could just keep bash as essential, but treat it as if it not were essential (i.e having explicit Depends: lines on packages that depend on it). -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3ia Charset: latin1 iQCVAgUBNGrqGSqK7IlOjMLFAQHJlAP/Xd4iRFLSse/+fLBfPmERPFwoOZ0/NrWz sdWVkFzdXyh8rN23WNA8MiKPYn/0lDYZNO1sSKTSDD9kNvkgobQ0D43KF80SKwBt g5FEcjWaheYdMgEJ7KYucGVG+fi7UuYC7mQFr9nd/HplLX+4AP6SimNv1281QR7O Er1pp440RRI= =8zRa -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
