Re: Proposed new POSIX sh policy

[Gabor Gombas <gombasg@sztaki.hu>]

On Tue, Nov 14, 2006 at 06:13:34PM -0800, Thomas Bushnell BSG wrote:

> I do.  Debian test is provided by the coreutils package.  As the man
> page says:
> 
>    ( EXPRESSION )
>               EXPRESSION is true
> 
> And, we have the existing rule in section 10.1 of the policy manual:
> 
> "Two different packages must not install programs with different
> functionality but with the same filenames."

By that definition bash is _ALSO_ broken because according to the man
page the coreutils test command does not support unary -a, -N, and ==
and therefore provides different functionality than the bash builtin. By
your reading, 'ktelnet' is not allowed to be installed as 'telnet'
because netkit-telnet does not allow you to request encryption. Care to
file bugs against the Kerberos packages to stop providing the telnet,
rsh, rcp etc. alternatives?

If you revert to the (IMHO much saner) interpretation of "different
_general_ functionality but still allowing extra command line arguments
not present in the other package", then dash suddenly becomes fine since
the "test" builtin provides the same generic functionality as the
coreutils "test" command (namely, evaluate logical expressions), just
the coreutils test happens to support some extra command-line options
that the dash builtin does not have.

Gabor

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     MTA SZTAKI Computer and Automation Research Institute
                Hungarian Academy of Sciences
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