Re: Proposed new POSIX sh policy, version two
On Sat, Nov 25, 2006 at 10:22:06AM -0800, Thomas Bushnell BSG wrote:
> This is an excellent example of doing the wrong thing, in my opinion.
>
> Why not fix the bash bug instead??
Because it is _NOT_ a bug in bash, it is a feature. AFAIR (it was some
time ago I've looked at the code trying to fix this issue) bash
guarantees some environment variables to always exist and to have a
certain (initial) value, and that requires calls to the NSS functions.
Removing support for the affected environment variables would fix the
issue, but would break existing #!/bin/bash scripts depending on those
variables. And I'm talking about user-written scripts, not
Debian-provided scripts.
This is a perfect example when none of the components involved can be
considered as bogus, it is their interaction that causes the problem.
One component (bash in this case) wants to do more than it would be
required for its role, and that causes a side-effect that makes the
other components break. The good old UNIX slogan "do just one thing, but
do that well" was invented for a reason...
Gabor
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MTA SZTAKI Computer and Automation Research Institute
Hungarian Academy of Sciences
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