Re: Official position on POSIX compliance?
On Wed, Jul 07, 2004 at 09:50:46AM -0400, Clint Adams wrote:
> > No.
> > 1) policy says nothing about e.g. chmod, as it is no shell builtin.
> Policy does not guarantee that chmod will not be a shell builtin.
> sash implements chmod as a builtin, for example. Furthermore, since
> maintainer scripts typically do not specify an exact path for the
> command in order to allow the system administrator to place an
> alternate chmod somewhere in the PATH, someone may put a
> strictly-POSIX-conformant chmod in /usr/local/bin.
> If one does so, is a script using
> "chmod -cfR --reference=/etc/passwd /var/tmp/blah"
> buggy, or is the sysadmin buggy for not using coreutils?
The latter. You shoot yourself gracefuly by putting anything in
/usr/local, this does not make it a bug in debian.
> > 2) We have yet not even decided which superset of POSIX-sh we will
> > require (probably just UP and echo -n)
> It would be silly to require all those interactive features for
> #!/bin/sh maintainer scripts, especially since the people interested in
> embedded systems want to cut bloat.
UP does not contain bloated features for interactive use.
> > 3) "echo -n" is definitely not POSIX (even forbidden for XSI) but we
> > encourage it in policy anyway.
[...]
> > 4) There is usually[1] no point submitting bugs about usage of non-POSIX
> > options for our userland. In the first place our userland is not POSIX
> > compatible (check e.g findutils) and in the second place we call it
> > Debian/GNU Linux *because* our userland offers more than barebone
> > posix.
> If you're going to mandate use of findutils, then I think it's
> reasonable to use all the fun featurees of GNU find. However, if you're
> going to allow the user to manage via alternatives GNU find and FreeBSD
> find, you need to stick to the lowest common denominator or be able to
> explicitly specify the one that you want.
[...]
FYI the *BSD finds offer a bigger feature-set than GNU find.
cu andreas
Reply to: