On Thu, Aug 05, 2021 at 08:32:39AM -0400, Greg Wooledge wrote: > On Thu, Aug 05, 2021 at 01:59:06PM +0200, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote: > > On Thu, Aug 05, 2021 at 07:19:11AM -0400, Greg Wooledge wrote: > > > The external versions of test and [ need to exist for POSIX conformance, > > > and also so that you can -exec them from find(1) or other similar > > > programs. > > > > I see. Do we still (seriously) care about POSIX (don't get me wrong: I'd > > strongly prefer a world where we did!). > > Depends on who you mean by "we". :-) > There are a bunch of people who do > care, and a bunch of people who don't. Yes, and I see that as a problem. > I'd say the Debian developers who package things like coreutils care, > at least to a certain degree. They won't go to extreme lengths to be > POSIX compatible, but they'll mostly try to do so if it doesn't break > anything or cause an unreasonable burden. [...] > I can't say which decision is the better one. I think this "soft POSIX compliance" might kill POSIX in the long run. Since everyone feels free to route around his/her personal pain points, there's little collective motivation to actually /fix/ them, and it might drift slowly into irrelevance. Now I'm not a 100% fan of POSIX /per se/ but I see the value in written standards. Standards processes can seem at times clumsy, but they force people to think about interfaces and specifications. Otherwise it's what we have now with WHATWG's HTML5 "living standard", which will end up with "whatever Google implements". Not much better, in my eyes, than the bad old times of Microsoft dominance. Cheers - t
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