Re: dash bug which is affecting release goal
On Sun, 2008-02-10 at 10:57 -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Thomas Bushnell BSG <tb@becket.net> writes:
>
> > Dash has a serious bug which is causing grief.
> >
> > The problem is that it overrides the system's "test" command (in
> > Debian, /usr/bin/test and /usr/bin/[) and does so in a way which is
> > inconsistent with the Debian versions.
>
> Onlookers should see http://bugs.debian.org/267142 for the long history of
> the previous discussions of this.
Indeed, I had forgotten that we had actually reached consensus and then
stalled at the point of getting the list of allowed-to-deviate builtins
settled. Colin had proposed the winning solution, IIRC.
The only builtin which we identified needed to be on that list was test
itself, and the problem here was that the deviations in posh's
implementation of test would pose serious problems.
That could be solved by saying something like "test may be builtin in
inconsistent ways, provided that X, Y, and Z features still are
supported." That could be written (by careful choice of X, Y, and Z) to
enable bash and dash to pass muster and still avoid the problems that
supposedly are raised with posh.
The other solution--which may be an acceptible short-term one, is to
specify explicitly that shell scripts must work with Debian bash and
Debian dash. I have no objection to that, and continue to think it is
the simplest approach.
As always, I am happy with just about any of these solutions, but the
charge-blindly-ahead method is not good.
Thomas
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