Re: Public service announcement about Policy 10.4
On Mon, Aug 01, 2005 at 12:40:43AM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 01, 2005 at 08:44:17AM +0200, Thomas Hood wrote:
> > Steven Langasek wrote:
> > > One might as well be able to expand "posh" as the "Pathologically
> > > Overstrict SHell"
>
> > Well, if, contrary to fact, the idea were widely supported then posh
> > could be adapted so that it implemented the minimum set of features
> > that Debian expected sh scripts to have. Then posh could be used to
> > test whether scripts were compliant. I gather that that was the idea
> > behind posh.
>
> > > while Policy's mandate of POSIX sh is important as a standard, the
> > > practical impact is nil once you start questioning those POSIX
> > > extensions that are supported by all of bash, ksh, dash, and busybox.
>
> > I don't know what kind of importance a policy clause can have if it
> > has "nil" practical impact.
>
> I mean that the practical *benefit* of such strict enforcement is nil. The
> *impact* is that it would be a royal waste of developer time to make all
> scripts compatible with a strict POSIX shell that isn't even optimal from a
> size POV.
>
> It's still useful to have a package which lets one practically test one's
> scripts for POSIX compatibility, but it just doesn't make any sense to
> enforce this level of strictness archive-wide.
I think we should require that a base install should be POSIX
compliant; for everything else we can be a bit more lax.
But unlike some others, I don't see the point of rejecting patches
to fix XSI:isms/bashisms in various shell scripts. It's one thing to
not actively fix your packages because other things have a higher
priority, but when someone else goes through the trouble of fixing
your packages and submit patches, I think rejecting the patches
is pretty unnecessary.
Having POSIX-clean scripts also ensures that busybox sh will be
able to run the scripts, something that's *very* useful on embedded
Debian-based systems.
Regards: David Weinehall
--
/) David Weinehall <tao@debian.org> /) Rime on my window (\
// ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ // Diamond-white roses of fire //
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