Re: Bug#267142: debian-policy: Sections 10.4 and 6.1 are inconsistent (Posix doesn't say what you think it says)
Andrew Suffield <asuffield@debian.org> writes:
> On Fri, Sep 10, 2004 at 08:41:33PM -0700, Thomas Bushnell BSG wrote:
>> > Any /bin/sh script must work with a minimal POSIX-compliant shell with
>> > no builtins other than the required ones. /bin/sh scripts must also
>> > work with any POSIX-compliant implementations of the following basic
>> > utilities: echo, test, (whatever else we want to list).
>> > Exceptionally, /bin/sh scripts may assume that echo -n works to
>> > suppress the output of a newline.
>>
>> This is OPTION 3 in my original bug report. It does indeed solve the
>> problem.
> Policy is not a stick with which to beat maintainers. You can't have
> that unless you can somehow first convince them all to change their
> scripts.
I'm missing why this is the case. The impression that I've gotten from
past bug reports and past discussion on debian-devel is that Debian by and
large *already* complies with the above policy, and in fact I would have
characterized it as an effort to document current practice (provided the
-a and -o exceptions are also added for test).
Why would this require changing every maintainer script? I must be
missing something. Please note that I certainly do *not* advocate listing
every single POSIX utility in that list that includes echo and test; in
fact, echo and test may be the only things worth listing right now, if
they're the only ones we've run into problems with.
Maybe I've miswordered the POSIX shell requirement? There may be other
things that we require that the shell support that are supported by both
dash and bash.
I just find it difficult to both follow Policy and make people happy right
now, since it's not clear exactly what shell features are allowed and
which aren't. Testing against specific shells doesn't strike me as a
great solution for all the reasons already stated in this thread.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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