Debian Developers - Re: Proposed new POSIX sh policy

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Author Re: Proposed new POSIX sh policy
Thomas Bushnell BSG

2006-11-15, 1:32 am

On Wed, 2006-11-15 at 02:20 +0100, David Weinehall wrote:
>
> And you belong to the group of people that caused it to fail...


I refused to stop using test -a in my packages as well, and refused to
declare #!/bin/bash.

Here's why.

test -a is not a "bashism".

It's a feature of the Debian test program. It happens that bash
declares a builtin, but that's irrelevant. Bash's builtin is compatible
with the Debian test, and *that's* relevant.

Some /bin/sh programs happen to *override* the Debian test builtin, and
do so *in incompatible ways*. If those /bin/sh programs did not declare
a test builtin, there would be no problem: my scripts would get the
Debian implementation of test, and everything would be fine.

I believe that Debian shells should be required to abide by the same
rules as other things: A given command in Debian is required to work in
one way. If two packages install binaries with the same name, they need
to conflict *and* provide the same interfaces.

In the case of a shell builtin, there is no need for the conflict of
course, but it should *still* be required that the same interfaces be
provided.

thomas


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