Re: Official position on POSIX compliance?

[jdthood@yahoo.co.uk (Thomas Hood)]

On Jul 07, Jurij Smakov <jurij@wooyd.org> wrote:
> * Does the majority of Debian developers agree, that this compliance
>   should be enforced and bugs should be filed against the
>   non-compliant
>   packages?

Marco d'Itri replied:
> I don't. I see no reason to not use extensions like test -a which are
> implemented in dash. Disallowing them adds no real benefit to the
> distribution and makes script harder to write.

Policy section 10.4 is some reason.

    Thus, shell scripts specifying /bin/sh as interpreter should
    only use POSIX features.

Whether or not one thinks that policy is too restrictive at present,
it should be conceded that it is useful to have (and to adhere to)
_some_ policy.

I see no reason to amend policy so that it endorses the use of test's
-a and -o options, given that && and || are just as good.  A case has
been made for endorsing "command -v", though.

This debate can be carried on in #218530 and on debian-policy.
--
Thomas