Re: What 'sh' should 'system' use?

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello!

Philip McGrath <philip@philipmcgrath.com> skribis:

> 1) If we want to continue to hard-code a specific shell into Glibc, I think 
> we 
> should document the decision (for example, why 'bash-static' vs. 'bash-
> minimal'?) […]

The choice of ‘bash-static’ rather than ‘bash-minimal’ is motivated by
the fact that, in (gnu packages commencement), we want to make sure
‘glibc-final’ does not retain references to its build-time environment.
See #:allowed-references in ‘glibc-final’.

> 2) If we want to make 'sh' a weak/dynamic reference, I think we should 
> strongly consider arranging to make it available at '/bin/sh' when present. I 
> expect this option would require less patching of other packages *by far* 
> than 
> any other approach.

This is not a viable option because build containers lack /bin/sh.

Overall, I think the current situation is a reasonable tradeoff.  It
forces us to do some patching, indeed, but I think that’s acceptable:
we’re talking about a handful of packages.

WDYT?

Ludo’.