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A comment on Hard Rust requirements from May onward for all Debian ports. Parent comment

Re:Hard Rust requirements from May onward for all Debian ports by perlgeek on Saturday November 01, 2025 @06:01PM (#45785818)
> Shell (which probably means specifically bash)

Debian has ongoing efforts to make many shell scripts (like postinst Scripts in packages etc.) non-bash-specific.

A minimal Debian installation doesn't contain bash, but rather dash, which doesn't support bash extensions.

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Re:Hard Rust requirements from May onward for all Debian ports by bbarnett on Sunday November 02, 2025 @01:28AM (#45788031)
Whether with a base install via the installer, or debootstrap, I've never seen bash missing.

For clarity, 'sh' is what is softlinked to dash. Not bash.

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Re:Hard Rust requirements from May onward for all Debian ports by kees99 on Sunday November 02, 2025 @03:48AM (#45788824)
> 'sh' is softlinked to dash. Not bash.

And for a good reason. Dash is so much faster for small scripts that call each other. Back in a pre-systemd days, when init was done by a mountain of shell scripts, changing that symlink between bash and dash resulted in twice/half the boot time on some systems.

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Re:Hard Rust requirements from May onward for all Debian ports by throwaway7356 on Sunday November 02, 2025 @02:51AM (#45788603)
> A minimal Debian installation doesn't contain bash, but rather dash, which doesn't support bash extensions.

Please don't make up wrong facts that would be trivial to check first.

All minimal Debian installations include bash as it is an essential package. Where essential is used in the sense of https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-binary.html#esse...

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