[Top][All Lists]
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: "conformance" vs. compatibility
From: |
Paul Eggert |
Subject: |
Re: "conformance" vs. compatibility |
Date: |
04 Nov 2003 00:26:24 -0800 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.3 |
ari <address@hidden> writes:
> address@hidden said this stuff:
>
> > After 10 years of being merely `obsolescent', head -N has finally
> > been officially declared to be `obsolete'.
>
> I have yet to see a pointer to where the historic usage has been
> declared "obsolete", outside of personal declarations that it has been
> "officially declared obsolete" elsewhere.
"head -10" was marked as obsolescent in the 1992 edition of the POSIX
standard, and POSIX withdrew the requirement to support "head -10" in
the 2001 edition of the standard. If you don't think that makes "head
-10" obsolete then I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree about
what the word "obsolete" means.
People can reasonably disagree about whether it was wise for POSIX to
make "head -10" obsolete, and about whether it was wise of coreutils
to give the coreutils installer and/or the user the ability to disable
support for "head -10". But those are different issues. There's no
real dispute that "head -10" is obsolete.
If this really bugs you, then the proper way to change things back to
the way they used to be is to change POSIX. You can start this
process by filing a defect report with the Austin Common Standards
Revision Group; see <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/>.
Features become obsolete all the time in the GNU world. For example,
GCC 3.3 removed support for unescaped newlines in C strings. This
broke a few programs, but it's not really a big deal in the overall
scheme of things, and there are some real advantages to sticking with
the standard usage.
- "conformance" vs. compatibility, ari, 2003/11/02
- Re: "conformance" vs. compatibility, Bob Proulx, 2003/11/02
- Re: "conformance" vs. compatibility, ari, 2003/11/02
- Re: "conformance" vs. compatibility, Jim Meyering, 2003/11/03
- Re: "conformance" vs. compatibility, ari, 2003/11/03
- Re: "conformance" vs. compatibility, Jim Meyering, 2003/11/03
- Re: "conformance" vs. compatibility, Paul Jarc, 2003/11/03
- Re: "conformance" vs. compatibility, Jim Meyering, 2003/11/03
- Re: "conformance" vs. compatibility, Paul Jarc, 2003/11/03
- Re: "conformance" vs. compatibility, ari, 2003/11/04
- Re: "conformance" vs. compatibility,
Paul Eggert <=
Re: "conformance" vs. compatibility, Paul Eggert, 2003/11/03
Re: "conformance" vs. compatibility, Jim Meyering, 2003/11/04