Bug#267142: debian-policy: Sections 10.4 and 6.1 are inconsistent (Posix doesn't say what you think it says)
> What it mentions for the Korn shell of course doesn't matter here.
Is it? I was under the impression that a majority of the spec was based
on Korn behaviors.
> Can you give me a reference to the latter? I looked carefully, and I
> only found it mentioned as a utility.
In the informative RATIONALE section of the description of the "test"
utility:
Some additional primaries newly invented or from the KornShell appeared
in an early proposal as part of the conditional command ( [[]]): s1 >
s2, s1 < s2, str = pattern, str != pattern, f1 -nt f2, f1 -ot f2, and f1
-ef f2. They were not carried forward into the test utility when the
conditional command was removed from the shell because they have not
been included in the test utility built into historical implementations
of the sh utility.
> Policy does not say that you must restrict yourself to Posix features
> in general; it only says rather that you must restrict yourself to
> Posix features in the shell. Posix, AFAICT, does not describe "test"
> as a shell thing at all, any more than "ls".
It's possible for a shell to implement "ls" as a builtin. It's also
possible for a sysadmin to implement "ls" as a shell function or alias.
In fact, people tend to clamor about their need to have this ability
when it is suggested that a full path to a program be used in a
maintainer script.
I suspect that as time goes on, some people will want to use "ls" from
various *BSD userlands rather than the GNU coreutils version, and many
flamewars will ensue.
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