Honestly I’d cut them some slack. It’s easy to assume that a company their size just has all the money to pay for testing and qa and expertise.
But the truth is it’s probably just a handful of engineers who are passionate about playing well in the Linux ecosystem who will probably fix this and not make the mistake again.
Wow. First, it removes /usr/bin/R from your system without asking and replaces it with a symlink to Microsoft’s version of R, then it deletes /bin/sh and symlinks it to bash. I can’t tell if Hanlon’s razor applies here, but this is pretty bad.
Secondly, if it’s as easy to fix as OP makes out then he/she could have submitted a PR instead of writing a blog post. That would have actually got the message to the right people.
Honestly I’d cut them some slack. It’s easy to assume that a company their size just has all the money to pay for testing and qa and expertise.
But the truth is it’s probably just a handful of engineers who are passionate about playing well in the Linux ecosystem who will probably fix this and not make the mistake again.
100% this.
The OP should assume its a mistake and not malice.
It’s not as if the debian packaging rules are simple and easy to understand.
I think if you didn’t know that forcibly removing whatever was at /bin/sh was bad, then no packaging rules can save you.
s/on/at/
I mean, wow. On Ubuntu, /bin/sh is a symlink to dash and that’s very much on purpose.
Now I’m tempted to go see what their vscode deb package is doing.
Microsoft has been notoriously bad at Linux packages forever. Ask anyone whose had to install Hyper-V extensions manually.
There’s a follow up saying they fixed it already
https://www.preining.info/blog/2018/06/microsoft-fixed-the-open-r-debian-package/
Wow. First, it removes /usr/bin/R from your system without asking and replaces it with a symlink to Microsoft’s version of R, then it deletes /bin/sh and symlinks it to bash. I can’t tell if Hanlon’s razor applies here, but this is pretty bad.
Firstly, yes, some pretty bad mistakes here.
Secondly, if it’s as easy to fix as OP makes out then he/she could have submitted a PR instead of writing a blog post. That would have actually got the message to the right people.
Not quite a PR but there has been an issue for it since 2016 https://github.com/Microsoft/microsoft-r-open/issues/20