Date: Thu, 24 Jul 1997 02:11:57 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: TLiddelow@cybec.com.au (Tim Liddelow) Cc: Jason Thorpe <thorpej@nas.nasa.gov>, freebsd-bugs@hub.freebsd.org Subject: Re: bin/4154: wish /bin/sleep handled fractions of a second. Message-ID: <11276.869735517@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 24 Jul 1997 16:41:47 %2B1000." <33D6F92B.C22DDE54@cybec.com.au>
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> Pedantic, man! The new /bin/sleep will handle BOTH formats. It handles > a superset of the POSIX spec. No, it doesn't conform EXACTLY to the > POSIX spec but it _will_ handle all cases that the original /bin/sleep > did. I agree that of course it won't barf and be an error case now if Erm, you're sorta missing the point. This is not about upwards compatibility - this is about taking a BSD script and later trying to port it to, say, Solaris. Portability cuts both ways, and there's no advantage to be gained by turning BSD into a roach motel, where code can get in but, once "BSD-ized", never leave again. In this particular case, if you have a script which says something like: foo sleep 0.8 bar sleep 0.9 baz And you bring it to a non-BSD system, it will not sleep _at all_ since the other system sees "sleep 0", and that could be bad depending on what bar and baz do. This is exactly the kind of interoperability problem that POSIX was intended to try and solve. Let's not fight it. Jordan
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