On Sun, 28 Mar 2010 21:44:28 +1000 Allan McRae <allan@archlinux.org> wrote:
Hi,
I thought I'd run this past people on this list before I spent the two weeks that this would take me to figure out how to implement it!
This is motivated by experience packaging for Arch. Install scriptlets are written assuming /bin/sh is bash, which is true on a default system. But some people want to change their /bin/sh to (e.g.) dash. As pacman uses the default shell (as given by /bin/sh) to run install scriptlets, pointing /bin/sh at dash may cause failures when bash specific features are used.
So I thought, why not manually specify the shell for install scriptlets in pacman.conf. Something like "INSTALL_SHELL=/bin/sh" by default. Then _alpm_runscriptlet would call something like "<shell> -c ". <scriptlet path> && <function>" (which works for bash, dash, zsh, pdksh).
Comments?
Allan
Hi Allan, can't we use shebangs instead of inventing our own which-shell-to-use implementation? (#!/bin/sh, #!/bin/bash, ..) 2 other notes: 1) do we actually _need_ bashims? are install scripts too complex to be done in just posix sh? 2) I think we should make /bin/sh a posix sh compliant shell. (ie. dash. yes i know strictly speaking there is one variable missing to make it really posix compliant or something, but that's a detail) Dieter