Date: Sat, 26 Oct 2002 19:16:10 -0400 (EDT) From: Garrett Wollman <wollman@lcs.mit.edu> To: standards@FreeBSD.org Subject: Why I am opposed to a Standards Ghetto Message-ID: <200210262316.g9QNGAWB026174@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu>
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What it boils down to is that we end up with two completely separate versions of every utility for which a standard exists -- one which implements the standard behavior, and one which does not -- for all time. Broken scripts will never get updated, because script-writers will hard-code them to ignore the standard utilities and use the non-standard ones instead. (We see that already in Solaris, where many users are totally unaware of the way in which their default environment differs from what the standard says, blithely trusting in Sun's conformance claim on the ticklist without investigating all the myriad actions one must take to get a compliant programming environment.) That way lies madness. Every question about a standard utility will then become unanswerable without a piece of information users would be surprised and in some cases hard-pressed to answer. Ultimately, I think it's less of a POLA violation to tell our users, ``this used to work this way, but now there's a standard that says it works that way instead, and we wanted to comply with the standard'', than it is to encourage the creation of scripts which only work when one of multiple official FreeBSD versions of a utility is found in the search path first. Note that I am specifically speaking of the base POSIX standard. I am not including in this discussion the X/Open System Interfaces option of POSIX.1-2001, which is in essence the old System V Interface Definition. To the extent we can support XSI behavior without conflicts, I think we should do so. I do not think that we should supply a separate XSI version of utilities which do have significant conflicts (like `ps'), since our aim is not to emulate System V, and most of the differences as remain are old System V mistakes. -GAWollman To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-standards" in the body of the message
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