* Herbert Xu <[email protected]> [2010-02-22 07:50]: > Guido Berhoerster <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > It should be noted that pdksh contains many other subtle > > differences and is not really compatible to either ksh88 or > > ksh93, the behavior introduced by the test builtin of earlier > > pdksh versions is likely due to a misunderstanding of ksh88's > > specified behavior which was later fixed. So IMHO the > > consequence for ash should be to either merge the fix from pdksh > > or to drop -nt, -ot, and -ef altogether, I would prefer that > > latter since I think silently changing the behavior in an > > incompatible way is bad practice and these features are not > > specified in POSIX anyway. > > Well, as you say the behaviour is not specified by POSIX so dash > isn't doing anything wrong per se. As this has been the documented > behaviour within dash since forever I'm reluctant to change it or > for that matter, removing the feature entirely.
It is not doing something "wrong", but my point (and that of the original reporter of http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=558989) is that it is diverging from established behavior in widely used shells such a ksh88, ksh93, bash, pdksh, and GNU userland, as I said this was even fixed in pdksh where it originally came from. I don't know how many /bin/dash scripts there are which rely on this behavior from test -nt/-ot but it can't be that many and dash has only been called das since 2002. On the other hand dash is being widely used as /bin/sh, e.g. in Ubuntu, Debian, and hopefully soon openSUSE. Changing the behavior as pdksh did after ten years is certainly not a good practice but removing it will lead to an clear error message rather than unexpected behavior which would be an advantage when dealing with scripts expecting -nt/-ot but using /bin/sh. For this reason alone I'm inclined to patch this out on openSUSE. If dash aims to be a POSIX compliant /bin/sh which is "as small as possible", why does it need test -nt/-ot/-ef at all? BTW, why did you go with pdksh's test instead of the one coming with ash? -- Guido Berhoerster -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe dash" in the body of a message to [email protected] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
