Re: bugs just filed
Havoc Pennington writes:
>
> That makes sense, but perhaps the spec should make a point of saying
> that only the existence of the command and its general behavior are
> guaranteed - that its prompts and such may change. It worries me a
> bit that developers may be misled into thinking that su or passwd or
> whatever have a fixed ABI.
Sure, and this is also true for non-interactive commands. If the
output format is not defined, then relying on it staying the same is
dangerous.
> I'd agree that useful extensions to the SUS make sense. I don't see
> including extensions that are clearly silly like --debug, or those
> that are not especially useful and conflict with (vs. extend) the SUS,
> though, such as df -t. Just adding a note that POSIXLY_CORRECT may
> change behavior is a possible compromise here.
In the case of "df -t" I would suggest that the -t option be stated as
undefined behaviour, but --type preserved so the functionality is
still available. Its a bit trickier where the functionality is only
available through an option which would conflict with SUS. Longer term
we should speak with the maintainer of the command(s) in question.
Regards,
Chris
--
cyeoh@au.ibm.com
IBM OzLabs Linux Development Group
Canberra, Australia
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