Re: Latest list of undocumented commands
On Wed, 4 Apr 2001 cyeoh@samba.org wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 04, 2001 at 08:58:52AM -0400, Dale Scheetz wrote:
> >
> > 1. neither ar nor awk have manpages in Andries Bouwer's manpages package,
> > but I have man pages for both ar and mawk on my Debian box, so I guess I
> > should look a SUS first? What is the defining doc otherwise?
>
> Andries Bouwer's man pages don't (AFAIK) cover sections 1 or 8. Man
Well, it delivers both, although there are only 5 pages in section 8, while
my /usr/share/man/man8 contains almost 100. In section 1 there are several
references from the working list that would be useful.
> pages for commands (its a bit different than for interfaces) do
> sometimes differ between Linux distributions because they can use
> totally different upstream sources for the command or they patch them
> differently.
Well, are we documenting current usage, or specifying correct
compatibility behavior?
I know of several flame wars recently about changing upstream options and
how they behave. There's no way to resolve "current usage" under those
circumstances. Don't get me wrong. None of those things is going on WRT ar
or awk as far as I know...
>
> I have been using the SUS as the primary reference and generally using
> the guidelines at:
>
> http://ozlabs.org/people/cyeoh/lsb/cspec_guidelines.html
>
> to resolve conflicts.
Been there, done that ;-)
That's why I asked.
For instance do we prefer GNU interfaces over BSD ones, or both?
(for example: ash is only available from BSD.)
If SUS specs a set of options, and those are used by the current distros,
then it is obvious that the other options used by all should be included
as additions to the SUS spec, but how do I choose if the current usage
contradicts SUS in some way?
Those are just off the top of my head, I'm sure I'll think of something
else as the work progresses ;-)
>
> > 2. awk is probably not used on any Linux these days and has been replaced
> > by gawk, mawk, and nawk (possibly bawk and cawk ;-), so what should the
> > spec call out? Should I look for a compatible subset of features or should
> > we spec a particular fork, like gawk?
>
> I'm not sure about this one (opinions anyone else?). I haven't
> addressed the problems of language syntax extensions/differences for
> commands like make, awk or sed either.
>
With awk the problem is which set of options are likely to exist on any
given system. Debian provides gawk, but the "standard system" comes with
mawk instead because it's smaller, so gawk may not be there. Without any
investigation I can imagine how it got smaller ;-)
So, should I go for a limiting spec that will cover all the possibilities,
or a broader spec requiring one specific fork out of the many available?
Waiting is,
Dwarf
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