Hi, This bug report seems to have branched in to a couple of issues relating to dash's use of diversions and its use as /bin/sh, rather than the original issue of whether the preinst should be moved to something that doesn't rely on /bin/sh working; some of these should probably be moved elsewhere:
* handling of local diversions - already #538822 - as such diversions must have been manually added, for squeeze this may be a documented upgrade issue (in the release notes) * extending the handling of /bin/sh to include more shells than bash and dash - definitely post-squeeze material * the preinst isn't idempotent - from a few quick tests, it looks like this could be resolved by changing the execution order to "cp, ln, divert" rather than "divert, cp, ln"; I may have missed something, however That leaves us with the question of what should be done in terms of not having dash's preinst be a /bin/sh script. I think everyone agrees that this should be done; the current suggestions appear to be: * make it a /bin/bash script instead This is a "no brainer" change in terms of ensuring correctness; no changes are required to the remainder of the script. It does mean that dash can't be reinstalled in a situation where the installation of bash is damaged. * make it a compiled C program This means that dash can be reinstalled in situations where both bash and dash are damaged or otherwise unavailable and means dash doesn't require bash. Both of these are certainly reasonable goals, but this approach is a more fundamental change and may be more difficult to test, so the question is whether the potential gains are worth the risk at this stage of the release process. The transition to dash-as-bin-sh won't realistically allow users to remove bash from squeeze systems without both overriding the package manager and careful consideration of the consequences in any case - bash is still essential and there are therefore a number of packages which ship /bin/bash scripts with no dependency (devscripts being an example I know ottomh). Regards, Adam -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
