hi all, On Thu, 13 Oct 2022 18:52:51 +0100 Sam James <s...@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > On 13 Oct 2022, at 18:46, Sam Trenholme <mara...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > After spending nearly an hour updating all of the scripts in the test > > framework for one of my open source projects to no longer use egrep, > > I’m going to say it: > > > > We should not deprecate egrep and fgrep > > > > egrep and fgrep have been around since the 1970s, were in wide use > > well over 25 years ago on the SunOS machines we used at the time, and > > are widely supported, e.g. Busybox includes an fgrep and egrep. > > > > Even the Posix spec acknowledges that that should remain supported for > > the foreseeable future: > > > > “The old egrep and fgrep commands are likely to be supported for many > > years to come as implementation extensions, allowing historical > > applications to operate unmodified.” > > > > See https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/grep.html > > > > Here is the amount of headache I went through to replace egrep with grep -E: > > > > https://github.com/samboy/MaraDNS/commit/afc9d1800f3a641bdf1bf14d39802443a34c2b70 > > > > There are countless other shell scripts out there on countless > > machines which still use these commands. We should not lightly break > > widely deployed software, especially software which only needs two > > one-line shell scripts. > > Yep, I really do agree -- and Iv'e already provided examples of things > which did break in the wild. Just make it a GNU extension and call it a day. > > While I sympathise with the maintainers' perspective, it's pretty > clear that in reality, nobody actually realised it was "obsolescent" > and in fact actively using it in new scripts. > > Really, speaking from my perspective, distribution maintainers have > got enough going on with various fires (Clang 16, OpenSSL 3, > time64 migration, ...) that handling various trivial-but-numerous > grep bugs on top is not very helpful :( > +1. hope i'm not "alayhum"ing / "lynch"ing here, but I agree that breaking backcompat for vanity is bad. > Best, > sam -- Shlomi Fish https://www.shlomifish.org/ Perl Elems to Avoid - https://perl-begin.org/tutorials/bad-elements/ Chuck Norris knows who John Galt is. — https://www.shlomifish.org/humour/bits/facts/Chuck-Norris/ Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - https://shlom.in/reply .