[MPlayer-dev-eng] [PATCH] fix for textultils 2.1 coreutils 5.0 "-1" deprecation

[D Richard Felker III]

On Wed, Jul 09, 2003 at 11:28:45AM -0400, Paul Jarc wrote:
> Arpi <arpi at thot.banki.hu> wrote:
> >> But POSIXLY_CORRECT may affect lots of other things too; it's hard to
> >> predict whether unsetting it might break things for some users.  OTOH,
> >
> > yes, same way as setting it break things now, so it's not worse...
> 
> If the user sets or unsets it, and something breaks, it's the user's
> fault (or POSIX's, etc.).  If the configure script sets or unsets it,
> and something breaks, it's the script's fault.
> 
> >> sed works everywhere and doesn't interfere with anything else.
> >
> > yes and we could package and use our own head/tail implementations too...
> 
> The change I'm suggesting is very small.  It will make the configure
> script work in more situations than it does now.  These simple
> invocations of sed are just as maintainable as invocations of head or
> tail.  What's the downside?

It's just stupid. If the user sets up their system so that it's
broken, then it's *their* fault, and they should fix it. Unless you're
*SURE* switching to the sed trick will work correctly on *ALL* systems
(keep in mind, sed can often have bugs) then there is no point in
switching to accomodate users who intentionally broke their systems.
BTW, can you quote something from POSIX where it says -1 is not
supposed to work??

Rich