On Wed, Dec 13, 2000 at 09:22:38PM +0000, Ian Jackson wrote: > I agree completely. If a shell is required, after seeing $((, to scan > ahead to see whether the thing is supposed to be a command or > arithmetic substitution, then it will have to either read the input > twice, or maintain (and try building) two parse trees. > > I think that this is an unreasonable requirement to impose on the > shell. That's fine; what I am arguing with is Herbert's reassignment of the bug(s) back my package. xserver-xfree86 cannot influence ash's parsing of shell scripts. My argument is that either: 1) Herbert can feel (with or without justification from the relevant standards documents) that ash should not support the construction at issue without whitespace added to disambiguate it; in which case the bug is a wishlist item against ash which he can close or tag as "wontfix". 2) Herbert can feel that ash SHOULD support the construction at issue without whitespace added, as bash does; in which case the bug is either a normal or wishlist item against ash, whichever he feels is appropriate, and he can fix it himself or submit it upstream. Either way, there is nothing I can do to XFree86 to make ash decide to parse shell scripts differently. That is the issue, and why I feel the bug belongs on ash's plate, not mine. As I said before, I already changed the shell script in my package to work with the existing version of ash, because I don't want the package to have to Pre-Depend on a particular version of ash in the event Herbert agrees that ash should handle the construction the way bash does. The outstanding issue is what ash should do, not whether my shell script is parseable by ash. > Herbert, is it - in your opinion as ash maintainer, or the opinion of > the upstream authors - a part of the the spec for ash that it is > supposed to support POSIX (let us assume that SuS and POSIX don't > differ on this point) ? I should note here that Debian's ash is a substantial fork from the upstream version. The codebases are quite divergent since Herbert is not in the habit of submitting his changes upstream for consideration. -- G. Branden Robinson | Convictions are more dangerous enemies Debian GNU/Linux | of truth than lies. branden@deadbeast.net | -- Friedrich Nietzsche http://deadbeast.net/~branden/ |
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