On Mon, Aug 01, 2005 at 12:40:43AM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote: > On Mon, Aug 01, 2005 at 08:44:17AM +0200, Thomas Hood wrote: > > Steven Langasek wrote: > > > One might as well be able to expand "posh" as the "Pathologically > > > Overstrict SHell" > > > Well, if, contrary to fact, the idea were widely supported then posh > > could be adapted so that it implemented the minimum set of features > > that Debian expected sh scripts to have. Then posh could be used to > > test whether scripts were compliant. I gather that that was the idea > > behind posh. > > > > while Policy's mandate of POSIX sh is important as a standard, the > > > practical impact is nil once you start questioning those POSIX > > > extensions that are supported by all of bash, ksh, dash, and busybox. > > > I don't know what kind of importance a policy clause can have if it > > has "nil" practical impact. > > I mean that the practical *benefit* of such strict enforcement is nil. The > *impact* is that it would be a royal waste of developer time to make all > scripts compatible with a strict POSIX shell that isn't even optimal from a > size POV. > > It's still useful to have a package which lets one practically test one's > scripts for POSIX compatibility, but it just doesn't make any sense to > enforce this level of strictness archive-wide.
I think we should require that a base install should be POSIX compliant; for everything else we can be a bit more lax. But unlike some others, I don't see the point of rejecting patches to fix XSI:isms/bashisms in various shell scripts. It's one thing to not actively fix your packages because other things have a higher priority, but when someone else goes through the trouble of fixing your packages and submit patches, I think rejecting the patches is pretty unnecessary. Having POSIX-clean scripts also ensures that busybox sh will be able to run the scripts, something that's *very* useful on embedded Debian-based systems. Regards: David Weinehall -- /) David Weinehall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> /) Rime on my window (\ // ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ // Diamond-white roses of fire // \) http://www.acc.umu.se/~tao/ (/ Beautiful hoar-frost (/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
