On Mon, 31 May 1999, Julian Gilbey wrote: > Santiago Vila wrote: > > However, since every awk in the system is always a new awk and it is > > always available as awk, we could standarise the expectations and declare > > that every time a program in a Debian system needs any awk (either old or > > new), /usr/bin/awk should be used. > > > > What's wrong with trying to standarise things? > > > > In a Debian system, we have already standarised that perl should be in > > /usr/bin. We have already standarised that perl is perl version 5. > > Why can't we standarise the fact that /usr/bin/awk is a "new awk"? > > Yes, I see what you are saying, but why should we worry about tweaking > upstream software in various packages (and who knows which they'll end > up being?) to use "awk" instead of "nawk" when we can simply provide a > nawk -> awk symlink in every awk package?
We could say the same for /bin/perl -> /usr/bin/perl, but we don't. Where is the difference? The reason I asked about POSIX is the following: If we rely on /usr/bin/nawk being there, but POSIX said the only awk supposed to be in the system is /usr/bin/awk, then our packages would not be as POSIX compatible as they could be. > [...] > You're right, it would be nice to standardise every invocation of > (n)awk to actually call awk, but it is not particularly useful or > worthy of developers' time. Hmm, do you mean that better compliance to standards is not worthy of developers' time for five nawk scripts? Thanks. -- "f13cb36629ec5f24c5023319e95ba8ce" (a truly random sig)
