Re: [Sheflug] suse source rpms

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <nospam [at] sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>]

>>>>> "Al" == Alex Hudson <eah106 [at] york.ac.uk> writes:

    Al> I don't see why adding features doesn't make bash conform to
    Al> POSIX.

It doesn't.  bash conforms.

But invoking /bin/sh should work with _any_ POSIX-conformant shell.
Therefore `sh --rpm-requires' is not a POSIX-conformant invocation.
Sorry if I misstated this, as I guess I did.  Note that "thou shalt
provide X, Y, Z" applies to conformance of applications; "thou shalt
NOT require any but X, Y, Z" applies to usage.

The reason it is evil to do this is that people will use bash-isms in
their #! /bin/sh scripts, then wonder why they get bug reports.  This
has been a big problem with Linux's rep among real Unices.  Which
Linux wasn't[1], until the recent binge of trying to conform to standards.

    Al> Invoking 'sh --rpm-requires ..' actually scares me more in
    Al> terms of something else: either, Redhat are expecting sh ->
    Al> bash (some assumption ;), or they're going to put

They are requiring sh -> bash.  This means that people who use just
about any [a-z]sh are going to have scripts going *BOIOIOIIIING*.
RedHat may plan to use #! /bin/bash, but I bet they don't properly
test for it.  (They don't properly[2] test for anything else, why should
this be an exception?)

    Al> --rpm-requires into zsh, tcsh, ksh, and anything else that

Thou Shalt Not Alias *csh To /bin/sh.

    Al> could be conceivably symlinked to /bin/sh ;))) What worries
    Al> you more??

This is exactly what worries me.


Footnotes: 
[1]  It was a pretty damn good excuse for one even before, and of
course among OSes it was even then ichi-ban.  But not quite "real".

[2]  They do test, and test hard.  But at least up to 6.0, every
version N reintroduced bugs from version N - 2.

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