On 12/11/23 2:56 PM, Zachary Santer wrote:
On Mon, Dec 11, 2023 at 9:26 AM Chet Ramey <chet.ra...@case.edu> wrote:Part of the issue here is that distros -- Red Hat, at least -- never upgrade the version of bash they started with. Red Hat will `support' bash-4.2 as long as they support RHEL 7.To be fair to the Red Hat people, "my scripts used to work and now they don't" is the issue they're trying to avoid, at least within a release.
Sure, I understand that. The part I was addressing was the "eternal
validity" of every bash release. If vendors are going to keep shipping
old versions of bash, it doesn't matter whether or not they are
declared EOL. That doesn't have any meaning. I don't release patches
for anything but the current version except in extraordinary
circumstances (shellshock was the only time, and I went back 8 releases
for that), so what does EOL mean?
On the other hand, they rarely pick up more than the most serious bug
fixes from subsequent versions, and most of the time not even those.
It does mean that people invest energy in devising ways to make scripts
run on varying versions of bash whose release dates span over ten years,
and become very angry when they run into problems with that.
--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU c...@case.edu http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/
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