> On 11 Sep 2022, at 21:41, Jim Meyering <j...@meyering.net> wrote: > > On Thu, Sep 8, 2022 at 4:01 PM Karl Berry <k...@freefriends.org> wrote: >> Hi Jim, >> >> Some must care about portability, >> >> Certainly agreed. Even I do, sometimes :). But that does not mean >> everyone needs to, in every situation. As I said, I fail to understand >> the benefit of making the warning unconditional. >> >> So far as I can see, it's also against GNU principles, as I wrote, >> though evidently you don't agree. >> >> and these warnings help them do a better job. >> >> When people want extreme POSIX compliance, they should set >> POSIXLY_CORRECT. That's what it's there for, and that's when I think the >> warnings should be issued, as I said at the beginning. >> >> But since Paul rejected that, ok, a different variable that lets us turn >> them off (GREPWARNINGS=efgrepok or whatever) would at least provide some >> palliation. I don't understand why you two are opposed to this simple >> remediation. >> >> As Gary mentioned above, it's easy to disable them. >> >> Obviously it is trivial to edit the scripts or have a different version >> in PATH for my own machine(s). But those are no substitute for having a >> supported way to use the distributed [ef]grep without warnings. >> >> I would argue that it is even more important to retain these >> stray-backslash warnings, because they tend to highlight real bugs. >> >> "tend" being the key word there. But anyway, I see your point, and won't >> argue that one further, since the efgrep warnings are what's causing me >> the agony. -k > > Hi Karl, > > It would help if you could point to some malfunction.
We've hit one malfunction in Gentoo: https://bugs.gentoo.org/868384. A program was using libgcrypt-config via CMake and ended up failing because of the warnings. (The program's usage is IMO ill-advised and it should use pkg-config, but that's beside the point). > > Consider the alternative. > > Should we release a new version of grep that provides a documented way > (say a configure-time option) to disable a warning about a > long-deprecated feature so you don't have to manually tweak the > four-line fgrep and egrep scripts? AFAIK, these new warnings cause no > malfunction. > > Wouldn't it be better to fix the roots of the problem rather than > piling another kludge on top to disable the annoying warnings? Think > about the next steps: when more and more distros cease to distribute > the egrep and fgrep crutches, what will people do? Eventually, we'll > all break the habit, at least in scripts. If you want to use it in > personal scripts or on the command line, create your wrapper script or > alias/function. > I honestly think at this point, it'd be better to just deem them GNU extensions. Best, sam
signature.asc
Description: Message signed with OpenPGP
