Re: Public service announcement about Policy 10.4

[Thomas Hood <jdthood@aglu.demon.nl>]

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.

Also I don't know what it is to question an extension.


> There are many bugs of much greater practical importance that people
> could be working on instead.


Well, we know how time consuming it can be to replace '-a' with
'] && [' in the offending scripts.


>> I support the idea of requiring #!/bin/sh scripts to be runnable on
>> posh.
>
>I don't.


So the idea is doomed and there is no more need to discuss it.

-- 
Thomas Hood