On Monday 11 July 2011 10:35, Chris Rees wrote: > Denys, > > I'd like to start by assuring you that I have a great amount of > respect for the work you put in to a highly important piece of > software, and would like to thank you for your positive responses in > helping to improve its portability. > > On 11 July 2011 01:50, Denys Vlasenko <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Sunday 10 July 2011 21:02, Chris Rees wrote: > >> Of course it's up to the Busybox project to set your own policy -- my > >> problem with adding non-standard features to shells is that people > >> rely on them and write incompatible scripts when *all that is needed* > >> is to just use the correct language in the first place. > > > > Bash was used in Linux from the very beginning, which makes it a de-facto > > standard. It doesn't matter whether you or me like it or not, we must > > account for the fact that long-time Linux users are used to it. > > Forcing them to stop using all bashisms is both counter-productive > > and arrogant. > > I find it unfair for you to call me arrogant when you are asserting > that everyone else should bow to Linux pressure and allow nonstandard > 'extensions'. > > What about the large numbers of people who struggle with breakage > because of the 'arrogant' people who write bash scripts and put it > into autoconf scripts? Or, worse assume that [ "$1" == "$2" ] is valid > [1]? Or using find with no directory arguments?
I think you are right in a sense that bash shouldn't have introduced gratuitous extensions, such as ==, "function" keyword etc. Perhaps echo builtin should have been implemented differently too. But it was many years ago. We can't go back in time and fix _that_. What we can do is to not repeat the same mistake of _again_ breaking compatibility. -- vda _______________________________________________ busybox mailing list [email protected] http://lists.busybox.net/mailman/listinfo/busybox
