Re: Latest list of undocumented commands
On Wed, Apr 04, 2001 at 11:07:13AM -0400, Dale Scheetz wrote:
> 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?
My suggestion is to try to find a compatible subset. Users and/or
distributions might very well want to use a smaller awk --- in fact,
in the case of extensions beyond what's specified in POSIX.2, I'd
think very carefully before including them in the LSB.
After all, the Wise Application Programer will limit him/her-self to
the least common denominator that will likely work on the largest
number of the systems, and that generally means avoiding the use of
things like GNU extensions.....
So even if we don't limit ourselves to POSIX.2/SUS, I'd suggest
including in the Rationale section a very strong suggestion to LSB
application developers to limit themselves to what's specified in
POSIX.2 or SUS.
- Ted
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