Re: [RFC] test: Old shells and physical paths

From: David Michael <fedora.dm0@gmail.com>
Date: Dec 20, 2012, 16:25 UTC
Message-ID: <CAEvUa7k8uimzjHd9jA=qjqK2pH-=oNRoY=ypN=bosmyGV52LoQ@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAJDDKr78ugSo9hNerHO0Y46_bSzLJWznB3E3+6H98NjMtBwHsw@mail.gmail.com>

Hi,

On Thu, Dec 20, 2012 at 12:01 AM, David Aguilar <davvid@gmail.com> wrote:

> Do you know if the differences are relegated to "cd",
> or do other common commands such as awk, grep, sed, mktemp, expr,
> etc. have similar issues?

There are almost certainly going to be incompatibilities with other commands. The system implemented UNIX95 plus some extensions, then they began supporting UNIX03/SUSv3/POSIX.1-2001/whatever for certain commands by using an environment variable to toggle between the incompatible behaviors.

Their documentation on the UNIX03 commands indicates it is still only partially supported. For example: "cp" supports "-L" and "-P", but "cd" doesn't.

> I wonder if it'd be helpful to have a low-numbered test that checks
> the basics needed by the scripted Porcelains and test suite.
> It would give us an easy way to answer these questions, and could
> be a good way to document (in code) the capabilities we expect.

I'd be in favor of something like this as well.

Thanks.

David

P.S. In the meantime, I am handling the "cd" situation by replacing "-P" with "$PHYS" and prepending the following to t/test-lib.sh. set +o logical >/dev/null 2>&1 || PHYS=-P