svn commit: r247274 - in head: bin/test tools/regression/bin/test

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Friday,  1 March 2013 at 17:13:45 +0000, Chris Rees wrote:
> On 1 Mar 2013 14:27, "Jilles Tjoelker" <jilles at stack.nl> wrote:
>> The find(1) and stat(1) approaches also work in other shells such as
>> bash, ksh and zsh. An extension to test(1) can only be used by writing
>> ugly things like /bin/test. Whatever you may think of it, people write
>> scripts for those other shells and it is somewhat unfortunate that they
>> cannot use all FreeBSD-specific features.
>
> +1
>
> While I'm aware that we have many very useful extensions to sh, we
> should not sacrifice portability.

This doesn't sacrifice portability.  If you're aiming for complete
portability, you may choose not to use these extensions, or to find
alternatives for non-FreeBSD systems.  This goes for just about every
utility.

> We (porters) are on thin ground when complaining at upstream for
> assuming /bin/sh is bash when we have extensions such as these.

There's a difference between having extensions and expecting them to
be present everywhere.  But you have a point: it should be documented
that these extensions (and also <, >, -nt, -ot and -ef) are not
portable.

Greg
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