Bug#267142: debian-policy: Sections 10.4 and 6.1 are inconsistent (Posix doesn't say what you think it says)

[Thomas Bushnell BSG <tb@becket.net>]

Clint Adams <schizo@debian.org> writes:

> The "builtin" is a red herring.  Your package will be none the wiser if
> a shell implements a "test" conforming to the de facto coreutils spec in
> the form of a builtin, a shell function, or something else.

Quite right, but the exact same is true of debconf.

My point here is that debconf and test are on exactly the same
footing.

Having specified them in Build-Depends (or relied on the list of build
essential packages), I am allowed to expect the Debian behavior of the
program.

Which means that "test -a" is currently allowed.

So, doesn't this mean that "posh" has a bug, since (I'm told; perhaps
I'm incorrect) it implements a "test" which does NOT conform to the de
facto coreutils spec?

That suggests a new option for solving the bug I reported, one which
is not one of my original four:

  Require any shell that implements /bin/sh to be required to build in
  commands (that exist as programs in the filesystem also) only in
  ways which are indistinguishable in practice from the normal Debian
  versions.

I would be as happy with this as with the list-of-shells approach, but
I think I overlooked it at first because I assumed that an option
which restricted the behavior of shells would be looked unfavorably
upon.

But this is indeed another option we could consider.

Thomas