Cc'ed to the LSB spec list. Briefly, the Debian ash package recently
changed it's implementation of echo to not support -e and -n behaviour
in order to match the Single Unix Specification description of echo.
(See http://www.UNIX-systems.org/single_unix_specification_v2/xcu/echo.html)
This breaks a fair number of maintainer scripts and init.d scripts and
such (and the change'll be reverted for the moment, at any rate). It
seems like this might be a sensible thing to do somewhat differently to
the SUS, in particular it might be nice to guarantee support of the -n
and -e arguments.
On Thu, Oct 21, 1999 at 10:21:25PM -0500, Chris Lawrence wrote:
> On Oct 21, Johnie Ingram wrote:
> > "Herbert" == Herbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au> writes:
> > Herbert> If it's implementation defined that means echo is also
> > Herbert> allowed to not support any options at all.
> > Er, hm.
> > Ok, now things have gotten out of hand -- this and other things
> > (telnetd, identd, ftp, netbase) indicate we have a developer
^^^^^^^
Oi!
> Well, I guess we could get in the "standards business", i.e. requiring
> any program that provides a certain command support particular
> options. This is "de facto" the status of /usr/sbin/sendmail, and
> could be extended formally to other "standard" utilities.
FWIW, the LSB current just has a link to the SUS page as its definition
of `echo'. As such, by a strict reading, Debian is de facto non-LSB
compliant. Of course, probably every distribution is too, since sh-utils
and bash have non-compliant echo's, but anyway.
In any event, this seems like an area we may as well just follow the LSB.
If `echo -n' isn't guaranteed by the LSB, we probably should get rid of them
from maintainer scripts. :-/
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. PGP encrypted mail preferred.
``The thing is: trying to be too generic is EVIL. It's stupid, it
results in slower code, and it results in more bugs.''
-- Linus Torvalds
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