Debian Developers - Re: Proposed new POSIX sh policy

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Author Re: Proposed new POSIX sh policy
Gabor Gombas

2006-11-15, 7:23 am

On Wed, Nov 15, 2006 at 09:44:09AM +0100, Eduard Bloch wrote:

> Where is your argument? Manoj asks you about facts and you answer with
> "can break". Everything can break if the local admin _wants_ th shoot
> herself in the food.


I'm not talking about the local admin. Right now Debian maintainer
scripts are not allowed to use the "enable" command because that is a
bashism, and more importantly there is _no reason_ to use the "enable"
command because simply saying "make /bin/sh point to dash if you want to
go faster" is much more effective and easier.

What I'm saying is if you take away the freedom of allowing /bin/sh to
point to dash, then people who care about shell performance will be
forced to use other means _even in scripts shipped by Debian_ - and the
"enable" command is a very powerful tool to achieve that. And at that
moment you will have exactly the same "builtins aliasing different
external commands in different scripts" problem as you have now when
allowing different shells - so you gain nothing by restricting /bin/sh
to bash.

> Following your argumentation, I would assume that we all have to switch
> to "trusted" (restricted) hardware and non-free OSes. Why? Because a hex
> editor could be used to modify the behaviour of every program with
> a sufficient level of idioticy.


I fail to see how that relates to what I have written...

Gabor

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