Re: [Sheflug] suse source rpms

["Alex Hudson" <nospam [at] york.ac.uk>]

>     >> RPM is Evil.
>     Al> Is this an official declaration ? ;)
> No.  But if it fools some people, I won't cry.  ;-)

You and your smoke and mirrors ;)

>     Al> what do they need bash changed for?
> So that it works better on Red Hat systems, what did you think?
>
> Basically, the idea is to use the shell's knowledge of the environment
> to determine which binaries will be run, and trace them back to
> packages for the purpose of computing dependencies for shell scripts.

Yeah, I read Jules' post, and I don't know - I'm fairly ambivilant about the
change, I think. It sounds like a good idea, although it's probably
something the packagers (i.e., the people making the rpms) should be able to
work out for themselves, really.

> If as Jules says `sh --rpm-requires bash' actually works, then this
> REALLY sucks, because when invoked as `sh' bash is supposed to be
> POSIXly correct.  (_Adding_ "features" is a no-no, since all right-
> thinking admins use zsh as /bin/sh because among free shells it is the
> nearest to POSIX correctness.)

I don't see why adding features doesn't make bash conform to POSIX. POSIX
specifies available functionality, and predictable behaviour - where does
this change? Say some program (a GNOME front-end for this lot, for example)
runs 'sh --rpm-requires ls', then bash isn't performing some operation
that's not POSIX conformant - it's just not specified, surely? The bigger
dog's dinner is the monkey who wrote the front-end - this is surely not
POSIX conformant, and further confuses the issue by calling sh rather than
bash and then calling on non-POSIX functionality. Unless, you want a POSIX
function to indicate when something isn't conforming - I don't think I'd
agree with than. If the program was requiring a POSIX function, called it,
but used some (non-POSIX) gnuism, then yes, I'd agree, but the action of
using something not defined by POSIX should be undefined. Of course, if
POSIX later go and define a standard for the functionality, then the
original programs that used the non-POSIX functionality find that they are
broken, but that's hardly a precedent setting event.... but, horses for
courses I guess. If it did anything, I'd prefer it issued a warning rather
than an error, but it depends on how you define POSIXly correct, I s'pose.

Invoking 'sh --rpm-requires ..' actually scares me more in terms of
something else: either, Redhat are expecting sh -> bash (some assumption ;),
or they're going to put --rpm-requires into zsh, tcsh, ksh, and anything
else that could be conceivably symlinked to /bin/sh ;))) What worries you
more??

Cheers,

Alex.

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