living with zsh

living with zsh

[Charles Hallenbeck]

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For a couple of weeks now I have been using the zsh shell as a 
substitute for bash. The grml folks rave about it, and in fact I rather 
like it too, ... until today.

I transitioned gradually. I did a musermod on each of my accounts giving 
/bin/zsh as the login shell, and played a lot with the configuration. I 
got it to do pretty much everything I wanted it to do.

So next I changed the symbolic link /bin/sh to point to /bin/zsh instead 
of /bin/bash, and tried out all of my own scripts, which worked fine. In 
fact nearly everything  worked fine. One of my audio programs acted up, 
and the way I was interrupting an in-progress play in the bash 
environment would not work in the zsh environment. I got that untangled 
and thought I was out of the woods.

I am running Debian unstable here, and have encouraged lots of folks to 
do that rather than hanging back in testing. And my experience has been 
really good. Until lately. I found a package (I forget which) that 
failed to upgrade when a "post installation script" failed. So the 
package was described as "not fully installed or removed."  Interesting.

I couldn't remove it, because it wasn't installed. I couldn't install 
it, because it wasn't removed. And because it was "not fully installed 
or removed" it was always attempted whenever I did an apt-get upgrade, 
sit-upgrade, install, or remove. I tried the various strong options for 
apt-get, even tried dpkg with lots of advice from the Debian users list, 
etc. I could not backport to an earlier version of the offending 
packages (now there were two) since I could neither remove nor install 
absolutely anything. And the count of "not upgraded" kept rising and 
rising.

To make a long story short, just on a hunch, I restored that symbolic 
link /bin/sh to point again to /bin/bash, and guess what? everything 
automagically cleared up. Nothing lost, nothing corrupted, everything 
hunky dory. 

My advisors had me hunting down the various post-install scripts and 
modifying them (yikes!) but switching back from zsh to bash was all that 
was needed.

How do the grml folks deal with this incompatibility? They use the 
apt-get mechanism for package handling, right? Is there a configuration 
tweak that I had not discovered to make it all work? 

At the moment I am retaining zsh for my login shells, but retaining bash 
for scripts and other shell uses. I'd be curious if anyone else has been 
stung by this stealth problem, which seems only to arise on a small 
number of rare packaging scripts, but when it stings, it really really 
stings, and stumps the experts too. 

Chuck

- -- 
The Moon is Waning Gibbous (87% of Full)
Get downloads from http://www.mhcable.com/~chuckh
  and remember, INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE!
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Re: living with zsh

[Tyler Spivey]

I believe the latest version of grml reverted the change of the symbolic
link to /bin/bash again.

Re: living with zsh

[Lorenzo Taylor]

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I had good luck with installing the zsh-static package and pointing my /bin/sh
symlink to /bin/zsh-static.  Actually, you may choose to point it directly to
/bin/zsh4-static, since this will skip the /etc/alternatives system entirely.
This will also help you if you are running a multipartitioned system with /usr
on a separate partition from / and you are having trouble booting the system.

HTH,
Lorenzo
- -- 
Be careful of reading health books, you might die of a misprint.
		-- Mark Twain
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Re: living with zsh

[Michael Prokop]

* Charles Hallenbeck <chuckh@hhs48.com> wrote:

> For a couple of weeks now I have been using the zsh shell as a 
> substitute for bash. The grml folks rave about it, and in fact I rather 
> like it too, ... until today.

[...]
> So next I changed the symbolic link /bin/sh to point to /bin/zsh instead 
> of /bin/bash, and tried out all of my own scripts, which worked fine. In 
> fact nearly everything  worked fine. One of my audio programs acted up, 
> and the way I was interrupting an in-progress play in the bash 
> environment would not work in the zsh environment. I got that untangled 
> and thought I was out of the woods.

> I am running Debian unstable here, and have encouraged lots of folks to 
> do that rather than hanging back in testing. And my experience has been 
> really good. Until lately. I found a package (I forget which) that 
> failed to upgrade when a "post installation script" failed. So the 
> package was described as "not fully installed or removed."  Interesting.
[...]

Seems you hit the debconf bug:

  http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=351031

> How do the grml folks deal with this incompatibility? They use the 
> apt-get mechanism for package handling, right? Is there a configuration 
> tweak that I had not discovered to make it all work? 

"/bin/sh now points to /bin/bash; reason: Debian does not support zsh
as /bin/sh, zsh is used as interactive shell anyway of course"

  -- http://grml.org/files/README-0.7.php

regards,
-mika-
-- 
 ,'"`.         http://www.michael-prokop.at/
(  grml.org -» Linux Live-CD for texttool-users and sysadmins
 `._,'         http://www.grml.org/

living with zsh

[Charles Hallenbeck]

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Thanks for the comments on zsh.

I feel a little bit like Christopher Columbus, who believed that he 
discovered the "New World," which of course lots of folks already knew 
about before he discovered it, some even lived there!

I gather the Debian folks are of two minds about this. One mind says 
that apt-get ought not to run under zsh and ought to be smart enough to 
insist on bash if it needs to. But the other mind seems determined, 
saying that Debian Policy requires that /bin/sh point to a Posix 
Compliant Shell, and zsh is not Posix Compliant. 

So, I'll give them their Posix Compliant shell in /bin/sh if they 
insist, but run zsh as a login shell anyway if I want to.


Chuck

- -- 
The Moon is Waning Gibbous (83% of Full)
Get downloads from http://www.mhcable.com/~chuckh
  and remember, INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE!
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