On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 04:10:54PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote: > > We want everyone to use dash by default.
> Who is we? Why is the sysadmin not the one making the decision? > Why is the Vendor making this decision for the user? Because there's no reason for an end user to care about which shell /bin/sh points to. If they care, it's because they're expecting to use it for something beyond what Policy guarantees it to do; that's not something we should encourage, they should invoke the shell directly if they want to use other features. > > If someone does not want to use the default, they are free to do so, > > but the default system shell is supposed to always be on the system. > Why? Is there a technical reason, or because you say so? > Frankly, if a user is happy with bash, they need bash anyway > cause they have users that use it as an interactive shell, adding dash > is pure bloat. They might not care for the 4 seconds it saves them on > boot, since they rarely boot. "Pure bloat"? $ dpkg -I d/dash/dash_0.5.5.1-2.1_i386.deb |grep Size Installed-Size: 216 $ That's scarcely more than the size *increase* in util-linux (an essential package) between lenny and squeeze: $ dpkg -I u/util-linux/util-linux_2.13.1.1-1_i386.deb |grep Size Installed-Size: 1624 $ dpkg -I u/util-linux/util-linux_2.15.1~rc1-1_i386.deb |grep Size Installed-Size: 1736 $ And in an embedded context with /usr/share/doc removed, the only impact is /bin/dash, which weighs in at a mere 84k. On whose behalf are you splitting these hairs, exactly? > I think we can engineer a system where Debian suggests various > shells as the default shell, and the user selects one. And only the > selected default shell is one that can't be removed from the system. I think we can engineer lots of things we don't need, this being just one of them. If the goal is to make *bash* removable, then I can understand why that would be helpful to some people since it's the heavier shell by far. None of what you're talking about in this subthread actually advances that goal, however. The blocker for removing bash is that today, packages invoking /bin/bash are not required by Policy to depend on it. And if they did, we might find that there are Priority: required packages using it, which there's no policy against, making the exercise more or less pointless. Oh yeah - libpam0g is one, and libpam0g is transitively essential. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/ slanga...@ubuntu.com vor...@debian.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org