Re: [PATCH] latest ash has broken 'echo' command
On Oct 24, Herbert Xu wrote:
> > What I seem to be missing here is why we're going out of our way to
> > make ash behave differently from other Bourne-compatible shells in
> > Debian (since obviously it behaved consistently before).
>
> We're doing this because ash can only serve as /bin/sh (which is one of the
> main reasons why it exists at all) if we make sure that our #!/bin/sh scripts
> stick to some set of standards. That's currently POSIX.2.
POSIX.2 specifies that an echo command MAY support options. How does
ash's echo command supporting options break POSIX.2?
Now, if we want to create a shell that only implements what is
required by POSIX.2 (which is different from a shell that is compliant
with POSIX.2), removing the option support from ash may make sense.
But, as someone said, be liberal in what you accept and conservative
in what you generate; if ash is intended to be a production shell
(albeit stripped down for use on boot disks), it should be as liberal
with options as is required. If it is intended to be a "lint" for
non-portable shell programming practices, then it shouldn't be a
production shell.
(For example, I can put lynx in a really strict HTML parsing mode, but
it won't view 3/4 of the pages on the web because they are horribly
broken. In strict mode, it's a great verification tool, but it's
hardly suitable for browsing the web. That's why normally it's fairly
loose about things.)
Chris, who suspects the tech committee is going to have to resolve
this one...
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