inode0 wrote:
On 7/6/07, John Summerfield <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Seems to me the best fix is for Red Hat to do it. Red Hat's broken
compatibility with earlier releases, and whatever individual users do,
it's still going to bite those unprepared.
The best fix is for people writing ksh scripts to stop relying on
system dependent behavior to be portable because it isn't.
If that were likely to happen, the problem would not exist. Probably,
most people who write to ksh don't know what the rules are: I personally
write for bash, and I know much that does work, but I have been caught
on bash bugs before. For example, prior to bash 2 this worked:
{ echo a;echo b;echo c }
The error isn't obviously an error, and I only know it's wrong because
the authors of bash say so.
If RH fixes it, then it's done for everyone forever.
How do you want Red Hat to fix it? By keeping their own version of ksh
which masks the buggy scripts? By sticking a link to /bin/echo
somewhere else where ksh happens to see it now (although this appears
to depend on what one has in the PATH variable)?
It's a useful workaround.
It doesn't seem to me to depend on what's in PATH: it certainly did not
test everywhere.
Possibly, using PATH fully is the correct behaviour.
Red Hat hiding portability problems in other people's code doesn't fix
the problem for everyone forever. They will try to run the code
somewhere else and it will fail again and be another vendor's problem
to fix.
While ever there is more than one implementation of a complex standard,
or there is some ambiguity, portability problems will arise. If you
expect your web server's documents to be someplace under /var, you will
be surprised if you try SLED. If you think MySQL implements SQL, you
will be surprised when you try it in Postgresql.
Red Hat putting a bandaid on this for Red Hat customers might be
welcomed by those customers but the scripts need to be fixed for this
to be fixed for everyone forever.
In your dreams. Through ignorance, through misunderstanding, through
ambiguity, incompatibilities will continue to arise: it's the way we are.
Heck, tell an American he's penurious, he'll probably deck you. Tell an
Australian he's penurious, he'll likely agree with you. Different folks
see things differently.
--
Cheers
John
-- spambait
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