Date: Sat, 26 Oct 2002 18:37:54 +0100 (BST) From: Mark Valentine <mark@thuvia.demon.co.uk> To: Garrett Wollman <wollman@lcs.mit.edu> Cc: freebsd-standards@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: /usr/posix: a first cut Message-ID: <200210261737.g9QHbsYS010289@dotar.thuvia.org> In-Reply-To: <200210261701.g9QH1v14024575@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu>
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> From: Garrett Wollman <wollman@lcs.mit.edu> > Date: Sat 26 Oct, 2002 > Subject: /usr/posix: a first cut > <<On Sat, 26 Oct 2002 17:39:35 +0100 (BST), Mark Valentine <mark@thuvia.demon.co.uk> said: > > > It installs versions of expr(1) and sort(1) there, reverts /bin/expr to > > being BSD-compatible > > I object to re-breaking the base expr. It just so happens the -CURRENT expr(1) breaks a large proportion of the scripts I've written over the last couple of decades, and I can't be alone. I'm pretty sure a release of 5.0 with this expr(1) will find a few more... One of the problems is obviously that I've not kept up with the incompatibilities introduced by POSIX, and believed the manual pages all these years. I was always happy in the erroneous (but practically true) knowledge that expr(1) didn't take any options. However, my main justification for reverting it in favour of /usr/posix/expr is that I haven't seen other vendors make their default expr(1) behave this way. Sun certainly haven't, at least as far as Solaris 9 FCS. The one change I *have* seen to support POSIX.1 is for implementations to silently discard an initial '--', which at least starts a migration path; in fact, I'd suggest we might even do this also in the EXPR_COMPAT case? The ability to set EXPR_COMPAT to deal with this problem is insufficient with respect to third party scripts over which the user has little control. I just find it hard to imagine FreeBSD 5.0 being the first OS release in my knowledge to break traditional expr(1) use. If /usr/posix is useful at all, it's useful for exactly this kind of thing; in fact there's no point having /usr/posix at all if we still break backwards compatibility due to POSIX! Cheers, Mark. -- Mark Valentine, Thuvia Labs <mark@thuvia.co.uk> <http://www.thuvia.co.uk>; "Tigers will do ANYTHING for a tuna fish sandwich." Mark Valentine uses "We're kind of stupid that way." *munch* *munch* and endorses FreeBSD -- <http://www.calvinandhobbes.com>; <http://www.freebsd.org>; To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-standards" in the body of the message
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