> This precdence question is really the only one. Is this issue serious > enough to change previous behavior in an incompatible way?
To me it seems most intuitive for flags to be applied after the environment variable, but I do not mind too much about this. > No. That is not consistent with the historical behavior of SHELLOPTS, > and not consistent with the behavior of environment variables. Agreed, thanks for the detailed explanations. I see now that the patch does not make sense and would only make things more confusing. > I'm not sure why the setup-ocaml authors chose the method they did, but > it seems like that's where this issue starts. Yes, given that there is this side effect of storing what is normally a shell variable in the environment instead, this does not seem like the correct way to achieve the goal of a globally set option. > Maybe they could change things to run `export -n SHELLOPTS' where appropriate. There is not really a good place to put these `export -n SHELLOPTS` lines in this case. Users of setup-ocaml would have to add these lines to their bash scripts which does not seem like a good solution. I think, as you've said, the issue starts with misusing SHELLOPTS.
