-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 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! -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.3 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFEkJIVXnuiIOyDVQURAnXxAJ9eHLFDz1t0uXFtmdYVQFjM7YGabACcCFqY q2SntCVrXbjW5u/U20jzak4= =vkQu -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
