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0 pointsguerrilla4y ago0 comments

In that case, pick the system which is statistically dominant and clone that. That'd be GNU first and FreeBSD second. The standard can be some subset of their behavior.

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capableweb4y ago

Or, add a new standard describing the wanted behavior from `which` which everyone is already using, but put it under a new binary name. If it's supposed to show the path for the thing passed in, maybe `where` would make sense.

dwheeler4y ago

They did do that. It's "command -v".

ketralnis4y ago

A standards descriptivist is unlikely to agree with "make a new standard so everybody has to change their behaviour"

gnubison4y ago

That’s not usually how standards are supposed to work — a POSIX operating system should not reimplement Linux, it should only have to reimplement what’s portable to existing systems.

StillBored4y ago

Except POSIX has historically always been the intersection of the major Unix vendors. Which is why its always been the lowest common denominator, and is largely crap as a result.

Of course to a certain extend all non defacto-standards suffer from this because invariably one group or the other doesn't want to rework their system to fit the standard so they NAK it.

gnubison4y ago

POSIX does simplify things, diverging from historical practice, when it’s reasonably the only way to standardize stuff that arguably should be standardized. And the vast majority of scripts are easily converted to POSIX-compliant shell script anyways — it’s certainly not “largely crap”.

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capableweb4y ago

dwheeler4y ago

They did do that. It's "command -v".

ketralnis4y ago

A standards descriptivist is unlikely to agree with "make a new standard so everybody has to change their behaviour"

gnubison4y ago

That’s not usually how standards are supposed to work — a POSIX operating system should not reimplement Linux, it should only have to reimplement what’s portable to existing systems.

StillBored4y ago

Except POSIX has historically always been the intersection of the major Unix vendors. Which is why its always been the lowest common denominator, and is largely crap as a result.

Of course to a certain extend all non defacto-standards suffer from this because invariably one group or the other doesn't want to rework their system to fit the standard so they NAK it.

gnubison4y ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse