Re: New packages and cross-config.gnu
> I'd rather GNU be a nice system, than try and separate out naturally
> joined functionality. sync, on GNU, should be responsible for sync,
> in all its various flavors. On linux only one kind of sync is
> possible, but that's not important to us; fileutils sync is GNU sync,
> not just Unix sync, and we should not hesitate to have it do better
> and more clever stuff on the Hurd.
Actually, there is a problem with this theory in some cases, and sync is
one. It can make it difficult to check at the shell level for the
availability of the functionality (without resorting to kludges like uname).
The usual way to check would be to try sync with various options and check
the exit status to see if sync supports those options. However, Unix sync
traditionally doesn't even examine its arguments, and always returns success;
even GNU fileutils' sync ignores any arguments other than --help or --version,
giving a message "sync: ignoring all arguments" and returning success.
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