On Wed, 2006-11-15 at 02:20 +0100, David Weinehall wrote: > > and failed > > miserably. > > And you belong to the group of people that caused it to fail... I refused to stop using test -a in my packages as well, and refused to declare #!/bin/bash. Here's why. test -a is not a "bashism". It's a feature of the Debian test program. It happens that bash declares a builtin, but that's irrelevant. Bash's builtin is compatible with the Debian test, and *that's* relevant. Some /bin/sh programs happen to *override* the Debian test builtin, and do so *in incompatible ways*. If those /bin/sh programs did not declare a test builtin, there would be no problem: my scripts would get the Debian implementation of test, and everything would be fine. I believe that Debian shells should be required to abide by the same rules as other things: A given command in Debian is required to work in one way. If two packages install binaries with the same name, they need to conflict *and* provide the same interfaces. In the case of a shell builtin, there is no need for the conflict of course, but it should *still* be required that the same interfaces be provided. thomas
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