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Re: Requesting advice re: Bug#204899: ispell breaks if _POSIX2_VERSION=200111 with recent coreutils



David Coe wrote:
> I didn't find anything about this when I searched the list archives;
> if what this user reports is true, and we want to support
> _POSIX2_VERSION=200111, it'll break many more packages than ispell.
> 
> Are we interested in supporting this? 
> 
> > POSIX 1003.1-2001 has removed support for commands like
> > "head -1" (you are supposed to use "head -n 1"),
> > "tail -1" (you are supposed to use "tail -n 1"),
> > "split -1" (you are supposed to use "split -l 1"), and
> > "sort +1 -3" (you are supposed to use "sort -k 1,2").
> > ispell still uses the old forms, which don't work any more on some
> > strict POSIX hosts (e.g., GNU coreutils with _POSIX2_VERSION=200111
> > in your environment).

There's been a fair bit of discussion in the BTS. Some workarounds have
been proposed, such as making glibc not default to _POSIX2_VERSION=200111,
or patching coreutils to continue to support the old syntaxes. There's
also a script in there that does basic grepping for the problem commands.
The best observation so far has been that users will still expect head
-n to work, and that this is a case of a standard getting ahead of
what's in standard use.

-- 
see shy jo, who has I_WANT_A_BROKEN_PS set

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