[arch-dev-public] [signoff] dash 0.5.6-1

[Dan McGee]

On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 12:40 AM, Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org> wrote:
> On 18/05/10 14:28, Dan McGee wrote:
>>
>> On Sun, May 16, 2010 at 4:58 AM, Pierre Schmitz<pierre at archlinux.de>
>>  wrote:
>>>
>>> On Sat, 15 May 2010 15:48:46 +1000, Allan McRae<allan at archlinux.org>
>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On 15/05/10 12:09, Dan McGee wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> Signoff both architectures, new-ish upstream version. We no longer
>>>>> build statically with klibc since it doesn't exist; instead this is
>>>>> linked against glibc. It is still super lightweight though.
>>>>
>>>> Signoff both.
>>>>
>>>> Although...   given this is no longer statically linked, does this need
>>>> to stay in the base group, or even [core]?
>>>
>>> Good question. I had to look it up: Dan introduced the dash package to
>>> have a non-breakable shell in core and a future provider of /bin/sh. But
>>> the latter wasn't implemented yet and no other package depends on it. So
>>> I
>>> guess we could safely remove it from core/base and add it to extra.
>>
>> Well since we have been busted as hell at requiring scripts to be
>> strictly sh-compatible, this hasn't been able to slip in as our
>> default sh (even something Ubuntu could pull off). I guess I don't
>> care what you guys want to do with it since no one really cares about
>> having a fast and stable sh interpreter; I gave up on this pursuit a
>> while back as no one else seemed interested.
>
> Well, if we eventually want dash as /bin/sh, then it definitely needs to
> stay in [core].
>
> Is there a bug report/wiki page or anything detailing what we need to do to
> make that change?  It has been so long since this was brought up, I have
> forgotten what has and has not been done.

* http://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2007-November/003053.html
* https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/dash-as-bin-sh
* https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DashAsBinSh
* All install scripts must be sh-compatible (or we need a way of
executing non-sh scripts, there is a bug open for that)
* Any daemon/init script is probably written for /bin/bash as our
rc.conf and other initscripts files use bash arrays, so those need to
be pointed correctly

I think it is something like that. We should probably drop this into a
wiki page; I also know there have been various pushes from within the
community that seem to have been snuffed out along the way as well.

-Dan