Re: Core

[George Bonser <grep@oriole.sbay.org>]

On 25 Jan 1998 john@dhh.gt.org wrote:

> Both Red Hat and Debian are making extensive use of newt and whiptail in
> configuration stuff.  You may also want to throw perl in there.

I notice that debian puts perl in their base and several installtion
scripts use it, mainly configurators for packages that run post install.

perl is a good candidate for inclusion.

> 
> > Well, with the inclusion of alien, and support for the various packagers
> > (dpkg, rpm, posix; though preferable lib* rather than the binaries), we
> > can make *that* part of the core.  Or, we can make it a Layer.
> 
> Make it a layer.

I agree.  There should probably be a package management layer.

> 
> > Well, the decision has pretty much been made for is.  sh and csh are Unix 
> > tools, bash and tcsh are free tools.  Guess which ones we use...? :-)

Right but I wanted to leave a method for a commercial system based on
Linux to include Bourne shell or C shell and still comply with core.

IF we allow that we must also state that any scripts that call 
#! /bin/sh actually be sh compatable otherwise they should call /bin/bash.

In other words, if you are writing scripts and you are not positive that
it is portable to sh, you should use #! /bin/bash rather than expecting 1)
sh to be a link to bash and 2) your script to be run only on Linux
systems.

This should be common sense but I would like to see sh allowed instead of
bash but it is not a showstopper.

> 
> I suggest that you require any POSIX shell rather than just bash.  That
> would allow people to use ash, which is much smaller and faster.

so we say 

bash or sh or ash?



George Bonser 
If NT is the answer, you didn't understand the question. (NOTE: Stolen sig)
http://www.debian.org
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