On 17 Aug 1999, Chris Waters wrote: > > But I think it's reasonable to change the behavior on new systems as > > long as that change is well documented. > > I think people will find it confusing if Debian is the only distro > that doesn't have bash as /bin/sh by default, and so I'd *rather* keep > it as the default, but I'd *certainly* like to make it easier to use > other POSIX (or even near-POSIX) shells as /bin/sh, for those who > prefer.
Michael's original note (I hope I don't misquote you, Michael) was that he wanted to deal with the bash failing issue. I'm going to address that for a moment, ignoring the "allow other shells" thread. >From a policy point of view, as far as I can tell, the bash failure is due to a dpkg bug, isn't it? I'm not completely sure if it's readline or bash that got removed, but my reading of the "Essential packages" section tells me that dpkg is violating policy by removing an Essential package in one case, and removing a package that an Essential package depends on, in another. So perhaps the best thing to do is to declare this a bug and skip the policy discussion? Ideally, the bug would be fixed someday without a flamewar and a big vote?
