Just "food for thought". Lately I have noted that bash comes dynamically
linked. Really it seems that this has happened for quite a long time.
However, one problem with one station reminded me of this fact. One
colleague made a rebuild of readline and the thing came broken. Bash
started to wildly segfault. Naturally, the machine came completely out
of control... Recovery processes turned hard because there was no static
linked bash on the machine Besides, such file does not fit in a diskette
with all needed boot files (and besides none of our 70 Mandrake machines
had static bash). The day was saved by using ash.static as bash and
making several "tricks of the trade" to recover old readline binaries
(we could not use any other libreadline.so due to some specificities on
the builds). In any case 2 hours were killed on recovery, because, the
lack of a real bash rised several "features".
Probably, 90% of Mandrake users will not fell into situations similar to
this one. But I think that having only a "dynamic bash" is absolutely
incorrect. I do think that bash should also exist in a static linked
form in the machine. Maybe not as the main shell but, at least, as a
variant like bash.static. A program statically linked and not being
regularly used has much more chances to survive crashes and glitches. It
is not a all-weather solution. But it will be of great help. It may
shorten recovery times, it may turn a potentially serious crash into
"short-time glitches" and, mostly, it may of great help during recovery
processes. I know that a static bash is damn fat. But, for critical
mission machines/tasks and recovery processes, it is a fundamental tool.
Besides, most people may not realize how crucial can be such shell like
ash.static (my colleague did forget to install ash.static). In any case
ash is not bash.
In any case, I believe that it would be more correct to insert an
alternative bash-static rpm into the distro. bash.static could either
coexist with or substitute dynamically linked bash.
Ektanoor
