[illumos-Developer] webrev: reimplementation of od

[Garrett D'Amore]

On Sun, 2010-10-17 at 13:20 +0200, Guido Berhoerster wrote:
> * Garrett D'Amore <garrett at nexenta.com> [2010-10-17 07:03]:
> > 	c) No support for legacy semantics of "-c".  If you want those in your
> > script, run your script with LANG=C (or LC_CTYPE=C), rather than in a
> > different locale.  (It will go faster, too!)  The semantics I followed
> > are what is required by POSIX.
> > 
> > 	d) No special interpretation of "-" to mean stdin.  That's verboten by
> > POSIX, and the xpg4 version doesn't do it.  So neither does my code.  If
> > someone *really* believes they want to mix stdin on the list of files,
> > let me know, and I'll craft a version up.  I just think its not very
> > worthwhile, its a semantics that is horribly confusing.
> 
> After the recent (heated) discussion about printf I find this a
> bit confusing, what is Illumos general strategy for changes to the
> userland? Quirk-by-quirk compatibility in order to prevent
> breakage of legacy scripts or modernization and convergence with
> /usr/{xpg4,xpg6}/bin?

Generally, I'd prefer to avoid breaking scripts.  Where I can achieve
that *without* breaking POSIX compatibility, that's a goal.  In some
cases we will have to decide individually. 

printf was an easy case to decide -- POSIX compatibility was easy (I
mean with the standard itself, not with the tests which I affirm are
testing behavior that is *not* specified in the standard and not
behavior that would be used by compliant scripts).

This one was a bit trickier, but it seemed to me that the legacy Sun
behavior was broken beyond belief in certain regards, so I have a hard
time believing anyone had scripts relying on it.

Where the Sun code is clearly buggy, I'll choose fixing it over
reproducing it.

> One minor issue, usage information need to go to stderr.

Easy enough to fix, thanks for pointing it out.

	- Garrett