> Nobody "decided" to accept/include gets. What was decided is the > general principle that POSIX is a superset of ISO/IEC 9899:1999, and > that in any areas where the two conflict, the conflict is > unintentional and the latter (C) overrides. This is very sane.
Very sane ? A mechanism that perpetuates gigantic security holes from one standard to another does not strike me as "very sane". It strikes me as "what the heck, let's be lazy and favor simplicity of the procedure over quality of the result". > What is Standard is what's Right. It's that simple. Obviously not, given the gets example. What is Standard is what is Standard and there's nothing more to it. There are good standards and bad standards. Good standards should be followed, bad standards should be fought and changed. Or we could all be running Microsoft Windows and just stop worrying about quality. > If you start trying to "correct" the standard, all you end up with is > conflicting behavior - now portable programs cannot assume either the > "Standard" behavior or the "Right" behavior Believe me, I'm well aware of the drawbacks and inconveniences it produces. My answer is that people make standards, standards do not make people. Standards should help people, not stand in their way. If a standard is brain-damaged, then it needs to change, period. You can follow standards all you want, but I would rather make them, and make them right. Anyway, we didn't start the fire. People failed to respect standards long before I was born, and will fail to respect them long after I'm dead, for good and bad reasons, and you won't ever get rid of the need for a configuration tool such as autoconf (which is horrible in its implementation, but necessary in its functionality). So, you might as well do what you want. If your deviation from the standard is justified, people will understand why you did it, and may even approve. And the last word belongs to Randall Munroe: http://xkcd.com/927/ -- Laurent _______________________________________________ busybox mailing list [email protected] http://lists.busybox.net/mailman/listinfo/busybox
