Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2002 17:34:41 GMT From: Mark Valentine <mark@thuvia.demon.co.uk> To: Garrett Wollman <wollman@lcs.mit.edu> Cc: standards@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Why I am opposed to a Standards Ghetto Message-ID: <200210271734.g9RHYfFH039142@dotar.thuvia.org> In-Reply-To: <200210271656.g9RGudeO031350@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu>
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> From: Garrett Wollman <wollman@lcs.mit.edu> > Date: Sun 27 Oct, 2002 > Subject: Re: Why I am opposed to a Standards Ghetto > So why is a small incompatibility in expr(1) so important to you when > the small incompatibilities in sh(1) not? Incidentally, the reason the expr(1) breakage is so serious to me is that _most_ of my scripts are _guaranteed_ to pass a first argument with a leading hyphen, because of an idiom I have used for many years to parse command line options. The fix is trivial (e.g. use a leading space both sides of the ":" operator, like I do for test(1)), but the consequences are not. Consider my poor former employer's support desk when their FreeBSD using customers upgrade to FreeBSD 5.0 and start seeing the product barf. This affects every product of that company. (Actually, in this case FreeBSD wasn't an officially supported target, though I made sure the products worked on it, but you get the picture.) Generalising this a bit, this may affect third party products which have been mothballed, or the where the vendor doesn't exist any more. Even though the fix is trivial, and since it's a script they have the source code, there will be a lot of end users unfamiliar with the product internals, clueless about shell programming, scratching there heads over this. It's messy, this Real Life business! 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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