Bug#34652: PROPOSAL] Policy is not clear about nawk.
> > > > Does anyone expect there to be a nawk program? If so, this suggestion
> > > > is moot. If not, we can probably just do away with it.
> > >
> > > Debian currently has five nawk scripts:
> > > [...]
> > > I see no reason to refrain from keeping the nawk link around.
> > > I also don't think this is a matter of policy; it should be up to
> > > the awk package maintainers.
> >
> > Fair enough. Then I suggest that this bug report is closed: the
> > reason that we need awk is that some programs expect a nawk program to
> > be present.
Eeeks -- important typo, I meant to say: "the reason that we need NAWK
is that...".
> I see things differently: The reason we need nawk is that some people
> expect a new awk to be available *under the name nawk*.
That's what I had intended to say ;)
> However, since every awk in the system is always a new awk and it is
> always available as awk, we could standarise the expectations and declare
> that every time a program in a Debian system needs any awk (either old or
> new), /usr/bin/awk should be used.
>
> What's wrong with trying to standarise things?
>
> In a Debian system, we have already standarised that perl should be in
> /usr/bin. We have already standarised that perl is perl version 5.
> Why can't we standarise the fact that /usr/bin/awk is a "new awk"?
Yes, I see what you are saying, but why should we worry about tweaking
upstream software in various packages (and who knows which they'll end
up being?) to use "awk" instead of "nawk" when we can simply provide a
nawk -> awk symlink in every awk package? Easier to control for us.
Less work for maintainers of every other package: they don't have to
care whether a script calls awk or nawk. And although Richard only
listed five nawk scripts, has anyone checked whether any other program
calls nawk from within a shell script?
You're right, it would be nice to standardise every invocation of
(n)awk to actually call awk, but it is not particularly useful or
worthy of developers' time.
Julian
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, QMW, Univ. of London. J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk
Debian GNU/Linux Developer, see http://www.debian.org/~jdg
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