Subject: Re: bug#25259: gnu tools conform to ?? older posix?
From: Paul Eggert <[email-masked]>
To: "L. A. Walsh" <[email-masked]>, [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2016 15:05:39 -0800
List-Id: <debbugs-submit.debbugs.gnu.org>

L. A. Walsh wrote:
> I don't think the above is correct w/r/t "rm" with its previous
> functionality removed to enforce compliance with the latest POSIX
> (not the 1992 POSIX).

Yes, that part of README is obsolete. I installed the attached to fix that and 
am closing this bug report. Although my impression is that you also want 'rm' to 
be changed, that would be a topic for a different bug report.
From 6a5f2e9940090b61bdc7c2b0600edc25579889f4 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Paul Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2016 15:02:34 -0800
Subject: [PATCH] doc: Update POSIX part of README (Bug#25259)

---
 README | 10 ++++------
 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-)

diff --git a/README b/README
index 1dea908..3910255 100644
--- a/README
+++ b/README
@@ -23,12 +23,10 @@ If you obtained this file as part of a "git clone", then see the
 README-hacking file.  If this file came to you as part of a tar archive,
 then see the file INSTALL for compilation and installation instructions.
 
-These programs are intended to conform to POSIX (with BSD and other
-extensions), like the rest of the GNU system.  By default they conform
-to older POSIX (1003.2-1992), and therefore support obsolete usages
-like "head -10" and "chown owner.group file".  This default is
-overridden at build-time by the value of <unistd.h>'s _POSIX2_VERSION
-macro, and this in turn can be overridden at runtime as described in
+Like the rest of the GNU system, these programs mostly conform to
+POSIX, with BSD and other extensions.  For closer conformance, or
+conformance to a particular POSIX version, set the POSIXLY_CORRECT
+and the _POSIX2_VERSION environment variables, as described in
 the documentation under "Standards conformance".
 
 The ls, dir, and vdir commands are all separate executables instead of
-- 
2.7.4