On Sat, May 19, 2001 at 09:13:31PM -0700, Zack Weinberg wrote: > I'd like to tighten this up a bit by requiring that /bin/sh adhere to > the consensus of implementations, where POSIX leaves things > unspecified.
I disagree, on the grounds that this exchanges an arguably specific standard for a completely vague description of /bin/sh behaviour with no understandable gain for Debian. Debian does have complete control over the shell scripts it ships, so if shell scripts have POSIX incompatibilities, we can fix them. The fear of bugs one might encounter when changing /bin/sh for a completely untested POSIX compatible shell should not stop us from making this requirement. Debian does not have the requirement that scripts are portable to a large set of systems with unknown shells, which have bugs or weird behavior in border cases. We can always fix our supposedly POSIX compatible shells if they turn out to be not so compatible. Indeed, we don't have the resources or possibility to test our scripts against a whole number of shells, or in any other way determine what your idea of /bin/sh is supposed to be. I am not even sure we have five supposedly POSIX compatible shells to test against (not to mention we can have any number of shells which "claim" to be POSIX compatible, because such a claim can be a fraud). You don't provide a reasonable motivation for such a change either. I don't see a hard need for such a move, be it a large area of POSIX-unspecified behaviour which we need to define, nor a real danger for systems which install an unknown POSIX compatible shell. Also, in cases where disagrement on the correct behaviour does indeed exist (or where optional features should be required within Debian), I favour to explicitely exempt those items in policy, rather than starting from a completely unspecified situation and work it into the concrete. You mention that disputes trigger endless discussions, like echo -n. Your proposal opens the door to even more discussion. In fact, it requires endless discussions, because your proposal is completely unspecific about the details. The attempts you make to specify what is not specified (by making it a necessity to number five shells claiming compatibility, by favouring POSIX over other features, by putting the decision in the hand of the maintainer where no agreement is reached) are failing short because they can easily circumvented formally and thus will not be effective in preventing such discussions. Just saying vaguely that POSIX isn't specific enough is not good enough to justify any change in the Debian policy. That aside, even if there is an understandable motivation to specify what POSIX doesn't, your proposal leaves a lot to be wished for. Thanks, Marcus -- `Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Marcus Brinkmann GNU http://www.gnu.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de
