Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2002 13:49:29 -0700 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Peter Wemm <peter@wemm.org> Cc: Tim Robbins <tjr@FreeBSD.ORG>, Steve Kargl <sgk@troutmask.apl.washington.edu>, Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@FreeBSD.ORG>, current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Who broke sort(1) ? Message-ID: <3D90CFD9.E0FB776A@mindspring.com> References: <20020924203011.5EF752A7D6@canning.wemm.org>
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Peter Wemm wrote: > Oh man, this is going to suck. There are thousands and thousands of third > party scripts that use +n syntax. > > I am most unhappy with this change. :-( I'll say it again: unconditionally complying POSIX is an impediment to getting real work done. 8-(. I would be very happy if a lot of the POSIX semantics could go live in a user space library somewhere, and leave programmers alone. Signals semantics and file locking alone are enough to justify that. Yeah, it's nice to have a Big Red Switch(tm) that would turn off all behaviour not mandated by some standard, so that you could flip the siwtch, and *know* that the programs you write will run anywhere the standard is implemented. It's a good goal for a platform, to let it act as a unified porting environment. The key thing here, though, is that it needs to be *a* swtich, and it needs to be a *switch*. For the particular case of "sort", it would be nice if it did what it was supposed to do, and got anal about POSIX _only_ if there was an environment variable set. Maybe there would be bonus points if the system itself could be built with the switch flipped, but that's something that can be done incrementally, later, by People Who Care(tm). Until "sh", "make", "tar", and so on also drop behaviours that are not specified by POSIX, it's really silly to make "sort" drop them. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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