Hello, On Thu 17 Apr 2025 at 03:51pm -04, Paul Tagliamonte wrote:
> Our goal was to have an image that wasn't unique (or suprising) to a > Debian project member -- rather, IMVHO, the package(s) should be added > or removed from the minbase set via our usual conventions. This makes sense. In this vein, I wish that our minimal install was POSIX sh-compatible. It currently isn't, because m4 isn't included (and maybe some other things). In fact, even on a regular Debian desktop install, m4 isn't there unless you explicitly install it. m4 is the only way POSIX.1-2017 defines to safely create a temporary file (outside of writing and compiling a C program). I think the newer POSIX standard has not improved on this particular point. Removing awk from default installs would move us further away from that. I don't know how common my view is, but I think making sure that all POSIX sh-compatible scripts could be guaranteed to run without compatibility hacks on any *BSD, macOS or Debian-based system would be fantastically useful (at least FreeBSD and macOS already have the full POSIX sh suite out-of-the-box; I would assume the other BSDs do too). I think the implementation of this does not need to be "Essential: yes", btw. Making it possible to be even smaller is fine too. I'm talking about defaults -- and I think that includes default/official container images. -- Sean Whitton
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