On 2011-07-06 21:07:09 +0200, Benoît Knecht wrote: > It seems to me that the non-POSIX concern was actually due to a > misinterpretation of the sentence "do not write any diagnostic messages > concerning this condition" (_concerning this condition_ being the > important part). So that part of the bug should be considered resolved.
Well, the main problem concerning the behavior is that the Coreutils touch differs from the BSD one: this makes writing portable scripts more difficult (in particular when one isn't aware of this difference in the behavior). This means that either POSIX is under-specified or one of Coreutils and BSD has an incorrect interpretation. I now agree with your remark and would say that the Coreutils touch is correct and the BSD touch would be incorrect. > As for the insufficient documentation, coreutils man pages tend to be a > bit short on words, because they are generated from the command's help > output. But they always point to the Texinfo manual for details, which > in this case states: "Do not warn about or create files that do not > exist." So the "no warning about non-existing files" behavior _is_ > documented. I think it would be better to have more complete man pages (couldn't they be generated from the .texinfo file instead?), in particular because they are historically seen as the standard documentation of commands. Now, since the info manual is provided together with the man pages and is referenced in the man page, I think that the user has all the information available, and the bug can be closed. -- Vincent Lefèvre <[email protected]> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.net/> 100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <http://www.vinc17.net/blog/> Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Arénaire project (LIP, ENS-Lyon) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
