Re: regression: "sh -c" change causes FTBFS
(-cc: debian-devel)
Stéphane Glondu wrote:
> [CC-ing debian-devel to get more opinions]
Sorry for the tone of my last response. But really, more opinions are
not needed, though the increased review of the ramifications of the
change is welcome. Facts should suffice. ;-)
> POSIX's Shell and Utilities (XCU) 2.12 [1] does say that "[the]
> environment of the shell process shall not be changed by the utility",
> and that environment includes open files. My understanding is that
> dash's new behaviour (and incidentally, ksh93's one) is incorrect.
As I understand it, the intent of that section was not to prohibit
changes in process state due to a command like "exec foo" replacing
the shell process. The shell execution environment is not changed but
simply no longer exists once execve() has been called.
More to the point, POSIX is very easy to change[1], so if this
behavior is causing a problem in otherwise reasonable application
code, methinks it would be better to discuss that instead...
From a release management point of view, I'm of course happy with
delaying reinstatement of the change in sid until the fallout is
better understood.
Thanks,
Jonathan
[1] http://austingroupbugs.net/
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