On Sunday 22 July 2001 17:30, civileme wrote:
> Many people have written to the expert list or to bugzilla witha script
> that worked fine in 7.2 and broke in 8.0
>
> Their contention is that the script programs, (grep or sed or gettext, for
> example) must be broken in 8.0 because their scripts work in 7.2.
>
> Sorry folks, time to sharpen your reading skills and take a look at POSIX.
>
> In every case I have looked at, the scripts were written non-portably and
> failed because locale-sensitive (as required by POSIX) scripting programs
> replaced the older ones, which were not POSIX compliant.
>
> As we move the distro toward compliance with LSB standards, we are seeing
> more and more complaints that we have a lack of standards.
>
> Standards mean predictable behavior for those who have a knowledge of what
> the standards are, and how they work. For everyone else, learning by
> tinkering, the standards mean _change_ which is likely to break a few
> scripts.
>
> If you have any doubts about this, start here:
>
> http://www.mandrakeforum.com/article.php?sid=1093&lang=en
>
> Remember what the charities say: Reading is Fundamental.
>
> Civileme
It seems that we, as users, developers, a community are at a quandry as to
our goals. I have heard it said that what will make or break an OS is
applications. So, on one hand we need standards (I am, if you recall a big
advocate of them), but on the other, breaking existing art is a problem.
would actually come out on the side of things behaving as designed, but I
recall sometime back, while doing some release work for a major SVR4 vendor
that I wnated to fix some ideosyncracy in cut, I think, in any case I was
told that their customers had some many scripts written depending on the
current (wrong, I think the issue was UnixWare compatability) functionality,
so I had to leave it as it was. Hoepfully everone will catch up.
This is just an observation, not attitude.
mg
