On Fri, Oct 03, 2014 at 10:42:56AM +1000, Russell Stuart wrote: > On Fri, 2014-10-03 at 00:04 +0000, brian m. carlson wrote: > > Unfortunately, some developers have outright refused to make their > > software using /bin/sh work with posh, even when provided with a patch > > (e.g. #309415), to the point that last time I tried to use posh > > as /bin/sh, the system wouldn't boot. > > If I understand what you are saying correctly this means policy 10.4 is > mostly ignored.
I think you're making the mistake of inferring from a few notable failures that the whole thing is broken. It's not. Policy 10.4 has been incredibly useful in practice to short-circuit a whole load of what would otherwise have been repetitive and time-wasting arguments about what shells we ought to support, by having the argument once and then being able to refer to its results in test code, bug reports, and so on. Most people who don't care too much about the specifics will go along with it and fix things up along with the various other things they do, and it's been very useful in harnessing the efforts of a long tail of developers that way. > If we want Debian policy to reflect reality and make it easy for > developers to test their scripts conform to policy, then it should say > "#!/bin/sh" scripts must work with dash. If we were to decide that #309415 should be fixed in policy (and hence posh), then it should be done by requiring support for the obsolescent XSI extensions test -a and test -o. I might even have supported that once except that the rules for parsing those are headache-inducing; yes, I'm sure shell implementers can manage them, but they're a lot of complexity to stuff into what people intuitively expect to be a simple primitive operation. As it is, I think recent versions of POSIX make an excellent argument for why they're a terrible idea, and I've generally found upstreams to be receptive to patches to avoid them. -- Colin Watson [cjwat...@debian.org] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20141004084300.ga14...@riva.ucam.org
