Re: POSIX misunderstanding

[Albert Cahalan]

On Tue, 2004-08-24 at 13:57, Paul Eggert wrote:
> Albert Cahalan <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > It's no more legal or illegal than "head -42 foo".
> 
> "head -42 foo" is explicitly disallowed by the guidelines.
> "head --lines 42 foo" is not.  But we're veering from the main point.
> 
> > I'm bothering.
> 
> Thanks.  (It's a thankless job, normally.  :-)
> 
> > So, will you accept the opinion of the committee chair?
> 
> There's no rush.  Let's wait until the standard is formally changed or
> corrected, as I imagine it will be.

There is a rush. Linux distributions should be shipping
with the very latest standard enabled. If "foo -x" has
changed meaning, the new meaning is desired.

Minutes of the August 26 teleconference include:

---------------- begin quote ---------------
XBD ERN 16 Utilities that have extensions violating the Utility Syntax
Guidelines Accept as marked.

It was agreed that an interpretation be made , that the standard
is clear and no change is required. The standard permits
implementations to have extensions that violate the Utility
Syntax Guidelines so long as when the utility is used in
line with the forms defined by the standard that it follows
the Utility Syntax Guidelines. Thus head --42 file
and ls --help are permitted as extensions.
---------------- end quote -----------------

(note that this implies that "ls --help" does violate
the Utility Syntax Guidelines, but that it's OK to do so)

There's no point in waiting for the interpretation to
be written up I think, since it just formally states
what I've been saying all along. The standard does not
need to be changed.

BTW, compile-time options are generally trouble. Most of
the time, one choice is clearly superior. Every Linux
distribution will want SE Linux support, will want the
very latest UNIX standard, will want LSB compliance,
and so on. Testing is easier if everybody is running the
same thing.