LSB-compliant init-scripts as release goal.

Henrique de Moraes Holschuh hmh at debian.org
Tue Jul 11 13:13:06 UTC 2006


On Tue, 11 Jul 2006, Mark Brown wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 11, 2006 at 10:59:49AM +0200, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
> > I was not aware that "sh->dash" was discarded.  Or do you mean for
> > etch?  I agree that it is too late to change it for etch.
> 
> Serious concerns were raised about changing the default due to the risk
> of breaking non-portable user scripts: people are likely to have coded

Indeed. sh->dash roots out brekage in just about everywhere, so it is *not*
an optimal way to speed a subsystem, because people have a damn good valid
reason to not want sh->dash in their system.

I have had to submit a number of bugs against upstream makefiles because of
bashisms, for example.  They creep everywhere.

I higly suggest switching the entire Debian-provide initscript farm to
#!/bin/dash (or another faster POSIX shell if there is one), instead.
That has no drawbacks to the user.

Doing so may require changes in dash packaging, though.  I'd like to see
dash made "essential" before such switch is made.  Using *pre*-depends on
dash solves the issues purely related to packaging, but is nowhere as
resilient as an essential package is, and we are talking about the boot
subsystem here.

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh



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